The Dartmouth Observer

2010-11-25T00:31:00.001-08:00

Two of the co-authors have moved to a new address.

http://aneededintervention.wordpress.com/

This blog will remain in tact for the archives.

Debunking Three False Memes About the 2008 Election

2008-11-14T23:31:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I hate the American media and the bloviating pundits. The only thing worse than the week before the election, in terms of stupidity, is the week after the election.

So I pen this note to clear a few things up about what just happened. Let me warn you: I am going to be blunt.

(1) The problems of the Bush era were not problems of execution, but of fundamental philosophy.

It has become commonplace to say that George W. Bush was not a conservative, and that Bush's failures as president was due to his incompetence. This is the wrong view. Ever since Ronald Reagan swept into DC, conservatives had been talking about government, high taxes, and runaway liberalism as the key problems of the country. Until 2002, for a variety of factors, Republicans had never had the opportunity to put all of their talk into practice.

From 2002-2006, during an era of united government, the philosophies that Republicans had talked about for 25 years were finally enacted. Look where it has taken the country. Debt-fueled growth has shattered the economy. Needless wars have emptied our coffers. A senseless tax cut has dried up revenue. Carelessness of governance has bred cynicism. Unilateralism has destroyed our credibility. Regressive fiscal policies has concentrated wealth into small segments of the population. Movement conservatives have polarized our courts and shredded our constitution. Poor judgement in economic affairs have increased the unemployment rate, decreased benefits, and allowed for a stagnation in real wages. Deficit-spending is drowning the United States in debt.

Having rejected the Clintonian course of leading by the power of examples, this Republican Administration has tired us out through the examples of its power-- overtaxing our reserves and weakening the nation and the international economy.

Had Bush's policies been successful, then America would not have rejected Republicans overwhelming in the Congressional elections of 2006, and across the board in 2008. In short, it's Republican policies that caused the landslide, stupid, not the Republican president.

(2) The Nixonian strategy of winning presidential elections through backlash among working class whites and married white women is over.

According to Ruy Texeira :

"[Obama's] WWC (White Working Class) deficit was very similar to Gore's (18 vs. 17 points). It's also interesting to compare Dukakis' performance in 1988 among WWC and white college graduates to this year's performance. In 1988, the Democratic deficit among these two groups was identical: 20 points. This year's WWC deficit is only a slight improvement (down 2 points) but the white college graduate deficit was just 4 points, a 16 point Democratic swing since 1988.

The stubbornly high deficit for Dems among WWC is mitigated by the fact that there are now far fewer of them in the voting pool. According to the exits, the proportion of WWC voters is down 15 points since 1988, while the proportion of white college graduate voters is up 4 points and the proportion of minority voters is up 11 points."

Republican racism, homophobia, and xenophobia has driven minorities (blacks, Latinos, Asians, GLTBQ) to vote at least 2.5 to 1 for Democratic candidates. Ergo, as the non-white share of the electorate goes up, the larger the percentage of the white vote Republicans need to win national elections.

(3) The Electorate is More Progressive Than in It Was in 1992.

There is a lot of talk that the country "remains" a center-right country. (What this really means is that even when Democrats win they should implement Republican policies.) Democrats must reject the defeatism that an unhealthy obsession with overreaching brings. The electorate is clearly and indisputably more progressive now. Why? Pretty simple, there are less white people in the electorate. In 1992, 88% of the electorate was white. In 2008, 74% of the electorate is white. People like to dance around the basic fact that non-whites are generally more progressive than whites on most issues.

This is an important lesson that agents seeking institutional reform have to adopt. Diversity-initiatives, when placed under control of the powers that be, transform into policies of mere tokenism. Middle-class yes-minorities are given seats of the table to ward of criticisms of injustice; the trade off is that they can not seek institutional equity, and certainly never aggressively. Alas, too many make the grave sin of confusing access with power. Where possible, every principled person should reject tokenism as a governing philosophy.

However, part of the reason that many push for diversification is not due to some fabled theory of shared minority essence, but rather because opening the floodgates to true competition shatters existing networks of privileged and hierarchy. The harsh truth of the matter is that the everyday practices of even so-called liberal members of the majority never truly undermine the informal social networks and discourses of intimidation, distance, apathy, fear, and disdain that limit what minorities can achieve and where they can go. A more diverse faculty, judiciary, congress, classroom forces into the public sphere the agency of people who don't fit the mold of middle class majority membership and its bounded politics of capitalist accommodation and complacency.

So, dear President-Elect Obama: do not be timid, do not appoint moderates, and do not be shy. Implement those programs that will work, under the mantle of progressivism, and let us watch conservatism crumple before us. Throw open the doors to the diversity of all, and let us break the halls of privileged, and the gilded elite who guard them.

About Those Lobbyists

2008-06-21T18:19:00.001-07:00

About Those Lobbyists

Remember how the Obama campaign is always talking about how it doesn't take money from "federally registered lobbyists" to demonstrate that "small donors" not "people who write big checks" are funding his campaign?

Oh, change, where art thou?

Note From a Clinton Supporter

2008-06-20T15:33:00.001-07:00

Note From a Clinton Supporter: Or Why Clinton Looks Better Every Day

Wow. It didn't take the Democratic Party long to jettison progressivism after showing Sen. Clinton the door.

Change that Works For You?

Well, apparently it's time for the Fourth Amendment to go under the bus. Surrender Steny Hoyer and Nimcompoop Nancy Pelosi have decided on 'bi-partisanship.' Which really means "Bye, partisan; Hello Republican Rule."

Change You Can Believe In?

Washington Post

BARACK OBAMA isn’t abandoning his pledge to take public financing for the general election campaign because it’s in his political interest. Certainly not. He isn’t about to become the first candidate since Watergate to run an election fueled entirely with private money because he will be able to raise far more that way than the mere $85 million he’d get if he stuck to his promise — and with which his Republican opponent, John McCain, will have to make do. No, Mr. Obama, or so he would have you believe, is forgoing the money because he is so committed to public financing. Really, it hurts him more than it hurts Fred Wertheimer.

Pardon the sarcasm. But given Mr. Obama’s earlier pledge to “aggressively pursue” an agreement with the Republican nominee to accept public financing, his effort to cloak his broken promise in the smug mantle of selfless dedication to the public good is a little hard to take. “It’s not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections,” Mr. Obama said in a video message to supporters.

Mr. Obama didn’t mention his previous proposal to take public financing if the Republican nominee agreed to do the same — the one for which he received heaps of praise from campaign finance reform advocates such as Mr. Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, and others, including us. He didn’t mention, as he told the Federal Election Commission last year in seeking to preserve the option, that “Congress concluded some thirty years ago that the public funding alternative . . . would serve core purposes in the public interest: limiting the escalation of campaign spending and the associated pressures on candidates to raise, at the expense of time devoted to public dialogue, ever vaster sums of money.”

Instead, he cast his abandonment of the system as a bold good-government move. “This is our moment, and our country is depending on us,” he said. “So join me, and declare your independence from this broken system and let’s build the first general election campaign that’s truly funded by the American people.” Sure, and if the Founding Fathers were around today, they’d have bundlers, too.

Mr. Obama had an opportunity here to demonstrate that he really is a different kind of politician, willing to put principles and the promises he has made above political calculation. He made a different choice, and anyone can understand why: He’s going to raise a ton of money. Mr. McCain played games with taking federal matching funds for the primaries until it turned out he didn’t need them, and he had a four-month head start in the general election while Mr. Obama was still battling for the nomination. Outside groups are going to come after him. He has thousands of small donors along with his big bundlers. And so on.

Fine. Politicians do what politicians need to do. But they ought to spare us the self-congratulatory back-patting while they’re doing it.

New Politics?

Via Glennwald:

Blue Dog Rep. John Barrow of Georgia has been one of the most enthusiastic enablers of the radical and lawless policies of the Bush administration. When running for re-election, he ran ads accusing his own party of wanting to "cut and run in Iraq," and was one of the 21 Blue Dogs to send a letter to Nancy Pelosi demanding that they be allowed to vote for the Rockefeller/Cheney Senate bill to give warrantless eavesdropping powers to the President and amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms.

As a result of all of that, Barrow faces a serious primary challenge in July from State Senator Regina Thomas, who decided to run against Barrow due to -- as she told Howie Klein when she announced -- "Barrow's failure to support his constituents against the encroachments of powerful Big Business interests." As Klein noted yesterday, Thomas' positions on both foreign and domestic policy are firmly in line with Barack Obama's views and with the Democratic base in that district, while Barrow has continuously supported the most extremist Bush policies, as he himself proudly boasts.

In contrast to Barrow's demands for warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, here is the statement Regina Thomas issued yesterday (via email):

After reading the FISA bill -- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- I thought "This can not be good for Americans. That the Bush Administration wants unlimited powers for spying on not only terrorists, but on any American citizen. This is against and violates the Constitutional Fourth Amendment [right of] privacy. This also allows warrant-less monitoring of any form of communication in the United States." I was disappointed and dismayed with my Congressman John Barrow supporting this Bush Republican initiative against Americans. Too often Congressman Barrow from the 12th district in Georgia has voted with Bush and the Republicans on key issues.

Despite all of this, The Atlanta Constitution-Journal reported yesterday that Barack Obama -- who has been claiming to be so emphatically opposed to warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, to say nothing of the Iraq War -- taped a radio endorsement this week for Rep. Barrow, with the specific intent to help him defeat Regina Thomas in the Democratic primary.

The article highlighted the reason Barrow was so eager to have Obama record an ad endorsing him and why it's so potentially important in helping Barrow win his primary:

Barrow beat a Republican incumbent in 2004 and had tough GOP opposition in 2006. But this April, Barrow picked up unexpected opposition from Regina Thomas, a well-known African-American state senator based in Savannah. Barrow is white, and in past primaries in the 12th District, black voters have cast nearly 70 percent of the ballots.

What makes this even more amazing is that, as the article notes, Barrow cynically waited until after Obama's sweeping primary victory in Georgia to endorse him. He did so only once he saw that Obama would likely be the nominee and obviously with the hope of having Obama encourage Barrow's sizable African-American constituency to support him. And now Obama turns around and intervenes in a Democratic primary on behalf of one of the worst Bush enablers in Congress -- not in order to help Barrow defeat an even-worse Republican, but to defeat a far better and plainly credible Democratic challenger.

The Obama wing of the Party started 2007 with Hope and Change. Now it seems that all they have left is Hope.

Yeah, I'm going back to my self-imposed exile. For some reason, I just can't work up the energy to blog about a political contest between two self-absorbed men.

Big States, Primaries, The Media

2008-06-18T12:06:00.001-07:00

What should astute observers take from the disjuncture between the national polls, which show Obama only barely ahead of John McCain and recent polls in critical swing states Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida that show Obama consolidating a significant lead in states John McCain has to win to remain competitive in November? A couple of things:

1. The Death of the Big State Argument: I can't tell you how many times I had to endure the claim that Obama "couldn't" win the "big states" in the primary and that said "something" about his chances in November. Problem is, you never could get the Clinton campaign or their surrogates to articulate what that "something" was. Most often I felt, and Hill confirmed it after Kentucky, that working class whites in those states would overwhelmingly back McCain rather than Obama because a: they didn't know him, b: he was "elitist" or c: they were kind of racist. Ironically, when Obama supporters raised these as reasons people didn't vote for Obama we were accused of stereotyping poor white folks as uneducated and bigoted, odd. Yet these polls speaks to the inherent fallacies of the "big state argument." The main problem being that, there are a LOT of Democrats in these big states and they are particularly energized by the failures of the Bush Administration. Currently in the Quinniac and American Research Group polls an average of 25% of Clinton Democrats are not supporting Obama, and he still wins the states by 4-12 points. The sheer number of Democrat-leaning voters in these states and John McCain's non-campaign makes it extremely unlikely that Obama loses in November.

2. Media Manufacture Conflict: We hate the MSM here at Going Down With Style and for good reason. For me, in particular, I'm peeved at the inordinate amount of attention CNN, MSNBC and Faux have paid to Democratic dissident organisations like PUMA or JustSayNoDeal, vocal minorities who claim to represent the 18 million Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary. The primary battle, particularly for CNN gave the networks a major ratings boost and it is in their interest to attempt to recreate and extend the fight amongst Democrats between Obama and Clinton supporters. Faux continues to have Harriet Christian of "inadequate Black Man!" fame has been featured on Neil Cavuto's show, twice over the last two weeks.
Two things of note about Christian's appearance. First, she could not articulate one reason why she would vote for John McCain, her rationale was all about a negative vote against Obama and the "new" Democratic Party. It's a free country and I say to Harriet, do you boo boo, please. But a negative vote doesnt have the staying power of an enthusiastic one. Second, Harriet lives in New York! The media's failure to recognize that its the internet, not demographic significance that has allowed pissed off Hillary suppporters to put on shows of strength. Though as of yet, no advertising time has been bought.

I want to end this post to say that the news that the Obama campaign excluded a Muslim woman in a headscarf from sitting behind the candidate at a televised appearance is saddening, frustrating and will be commented on in depth in a future post. For shame Obama campaign!

Obama Race Baiting Watch

2008-06-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

Election 2008: Race Baiting Report, Yeah we know it's only June.

But it's already begun. Terrorist fist pounds, conservative radio hosts, t-shirts, buttons and more. Closet racists are tearing their hair out at the prospect of a black man in the white house and we here at Dartmouth Observer, soon to be known as "Going Down With Style" are going to be compiling a record of race baiting this campaign season. As of June 18th, here are some unfortunate things I've observed.

May 13th-Curioser and Curioser. Perhaps the Obama campaign should rethink their chances of wining Georgia in light of this story. Marietta bar owner Mike Norman thought it'd be an absolute gas to create a t-shirt with Curious George and underneath it write, "Obama '08"

May 25th, On Faux News (surprise) Contributor Liz Trotta first "confuses" Obama with Osama, so 2006, and then hopes that both of them could be killed. Here's the link

June 6th, Terrorist Fist Jab Heard Round the World-Now fired Faux News anchor E.D. Hill referred to the non-issue of Barack and Michelle's cute love-pound as a "terrorist fist jab." What's even more ridiculous is the subsequent segment that agonizes over what the pound "means." More evidence that the media knows nothing about black people, or the last thirty years in pop-cultural history.

June 12th, Harris Texas-Local TV station KHOU reports on the sudden appearance of a racist placard displayed on the front lawn of a local man which read "NIGGER President, Bullshit!".
The man, a white senior citizen, attempted to play the sign off as a harmless prank. We look forward to more rambunctious revelry from this old scamp, a cross burning perhaps?

June 12th, Ruper Idaho-Perhaps in solidarity with listeners in Harris Texas, local radio talk show host Zeb Bell and guest referred to Senator Obama as "the black negroid Barack Hussein Obama." Fully exercising their constitutional right to idiocy, Bell's guests also described Obama's caucasaoid mother as "trailer trash" with a "fixation on black men." Personally I'm offended by the racism and that there are still Americans who have been taught the "seperate origins" theories of evolution, what's next referring to Bill Richardson as the Latinoid? Will this station's coverage of the Beijing Olympics make frequent references to Mongoloid? Stay tuned!

June 13 Fox News-Baby Mama Drama! Clearly feeling that Zeb Bell was stealing their thunder, Faux News segment producers thought it'd be "hip" to refer to Michelle Obama, longtime wife of a senator, mother of Obama's only children as his "Baby Mama." I was stunned, you were stunned. David Duke was all, "whoa, back off their Faux News."

June 13, MSNBC-You say Exotic, I say, why the hell is anyone paying Pat Buchanan to be on television? Perhaps in an attempt to counteract their perceived Obama love-fest MSNBC continues to allow Pat Buchanan to speak on the air. The result? Buchanan calling Obama "too exotic" for white middle Americans and then going on an unintelligble rant that caused his fellow commentators to only shake their heads in confusion. We concur, but our confusion comes from MSNBC deciding to give Pat Buchanan air time in the first place.

Whoo, exhausting. And again...it's only June.

2008-06-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

A great, if venomous piece by Tim Wise on the logical inconsistencies of "feminists" who frame voting for John McCain as an act of gender solidarity with Hillary Clinton. Here is a link to the piece, but I've also copied and pasted a particularly pointed section.

Excerpted from, "Your Whiteness is Showing"

For those threatening to vote for John McECain or to stay home and increase the odds of his winning (despite the fact that he once called his wife the c-word in public and is a staunch opponent of reproductive freedom and gender equity initiatives, such as comparable worth legislation), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

For those threatening to vote for John McCain or to stay home and help ensure Barack Obama's defeat, as a way to protest what you call Obama's sexism (examples of which you seem to have difficulty coming up with), all the while claiming to be standing up for women...

Your whiteness is showing.

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point--the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny--you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point. But on the first part of the above equation--the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity--you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque.

If it were gender solidarity you sought, you would by definition join with your black and brown sisters come November, and do what you know good and well they are going to do, in overwhelming numbers, which is vote for Barack Obama. But no. You are threatening to vote not like other women--you know, the ones who aren't white like you and most of your friends--but rather, like white men! Needless to say it is high irony, bordering on the outright farcical, to believe that electorally bonding with white men, so as to elect McCain, is a rational strategy for promoting feminism and challenging patriarchy. You are not thinking and acting as women, but as white people. So here's the first question: What the hell is that about?

And you wonder why women of color have, for so long, thought (by and large) that white so-called feminists were phony as hell? Sister please...

CNN: Full Obama Speech as he Wins Nomination (Part 3)

2008-06-05T06:15:00.001-07:00

Let's try again. I love this opening line about McCain and visiting economically hurt towns. It's a great way of emphasizing the guns v. butter line that is necessary to Obama's victory.

2008-06-04T14:24:00.000-07:00

In addition to reporting that Obama is creeping towards 300 polled electoral votes, electoral vote.com has an interesting take on the historic nature of Obama's nomination compared to Hillary.

Here's a link to their handy dandy website
"Either way it would have been historic, of course, but seen objectively, there is more prejudice against blacks than against women, so having a black nominee is a bigger breakthrough in a sense than a female nominee. While women haven't made it to the very top, they are well represented one level down: there are 16 women senators and 8 women governors. One state (Washington) has a female governor and two female senators and two others (California and Maine) are represented in the Senate by two women. There is one black senator and one elected black governor (David Paterson of NY inherited the job when Gov. Spitzer resigned). However, polls have shown that for some people race is still a hot-button issue and for others gender is, but for far more, being too old is a disqualifier."

On principle, I'm loathe to engage in my oppression is greater than yours contests. They inevitably lead to people belittling the experience of others. However I agree with these folks "objective" standard of comparison.

2008-06-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

Clinton Doesn't Concede, Savvy Observers Aren't Surprised.

Listening to Barack Obama speak so eloquently about Hillary Clinton's groundbreaking and ceiling smashing run for President, I was struck by something. I had not even noticed that Hillary Clinton, supposed life long champion for Civil Rights, made no mention of the historic nature of Obama's ability to claim the delegate lead. But should anyone be surprised by her insensitivity and self centeredness? Since their ascendancy to the white house both Clintons have demonstrated their ability to speak to, but not serve, the interests of African Americans. All politicians must pander, but some politicians (ironically those implicated in corrupt machine politics) actually deliver for their most loyal constituents. As I've said earlier, through the darkest days of the Clinton white house and in both elections, African Americans were key, stable, voting blocs throughout the nineties. To paraphrase Dave Chapelle, black people were strucky by Clinton's apparent ease among us, particularly in southern black churches were he clapped on time, swayed with the rhythem, spoke in down home cadences and grabbed and kissed every black skinned baby he could. Yet despite these superficial and cosmetic appeals, Clinton treated the black community as all Democratic candidates do, as a given. When it came down to legislation, particularly the last remaining remnant of Johnson's Great society, AFDC, headstart and a host of federally funded social services uniquely targeted for African American working families, Bill Clinton delivered the black population back to the hands of the states. The very bodies which the federal government fought tooth and nail in the sixties over Jim Crow and the electoral franchise. And then he washed his hands. While the black elite continued to fawn and preen over the "first black president" black single parents suddenly found themselves unprotected by rapacious republican legislatures who took a torch to the nation's social safety net, ratcheted up penalties for petty drug offenses, gave the police carte blanche in violence against black citizens all in the name of "reform" and the "law."

If African Americans had hoped for something different in Senator Clinton's campaign, they were sorely mistaken. Sure it all started well. My good friend travels annually to the Essence festival and was more than pleased by Hillary's keen knowledge on HIV-AIDS impact on black women and resisted all my attempts to bring her to Obama's side until A More Perfect Union. But the instant African American voters began moving towards Obama, Hillary responded with her usual sense of entitlement and her supporters began to question the "loyalty" of the black vote. Loyalty to what exactly? Her husbands disastrous domestic policies for black people? Or to her brief flirtation with the HIV-AIDS issue? In January Hillary began crediting Johnson, rather than the thousands of African Americans who had struggled since the interwar era to organize a national civil rights movement, with the Federal Legislation from the sixties. By March, the Clinton campaign was eagerly fanning the flames of what Geraldine Ferraro has coined, "racial resentment." Distributing flyers of Obama dressed in traditional Muslim garb, touting Obama's inability to win the "working class" in the primaries. The final blow, Clinton's own admission that superdelegates should support her because white voters supported her, the fair conclusion being that African American voters count less than whites do. What's next Hillary, a return to the 3/5ths clause?

So was I surprised by Hillary's failure to talk, even for a moment, about the historical importance of the first African American Presidential nominee? No. Her failure, as a progressive, to share in this moment with those who believe in social justice, falls in line with her inability to understand why black folks are voting for Obama (not against her) in record numbers. Her inability to get what it means to many people to say and type and declare and exclaim! that Barack Hussein Obama is the Democratic Nominee for President.

I recognize that some don't want to "hear about" or contemplate the significance of an African American as Presidential nominee or as President. Though I confess, I can't quite understand why being black and poor also means one has moved beyond being inspired by a major moment in racial progress. Not the victory. Not a victory that restructures economic relations or closes the racial wage gap. But a major victory nonetheless. And, if you take a listen to black media outlets this morning and I suspect throughout the campaign months, not a victory that exclusively reverberates in the black middle class, intelligentsia or the buppies. But a victory that will make generations of young black people, looking for any sign of validation from the larger society that does not include bling and or guns, Barack Obama will be a shining light. Call it earnest, it is. It is also the truth.

Clinton Didn't Concede

2008-06-03T20:58:00.001-07:00

Clinton Didn't Concede

And some people are unhappy. Being conciliatory wouldn't have netted her anything, and her final primary speech was hers to make. She won South Dakota and she's won every state in which major party elites were backing Sen. Obama. (California - Pelosi; Massachusetts - Patrick, Kerry, and Kennedy; Nevada - Harry Reid; New Mexico- Bill Richardson; South Dakota - Daschle) h/t Anglachel

I think she said it best: ""You know, I understand that a lot of people are asking, what does Hillary want? What does she want? Well, I want what I have always fought for in this whole campaign. I want to end the war in Iraq. I want to turn this economy around. I want health care for every American. I want every child to live up to his or her God-given potential, and I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard and no longer to be invisible.

You see, I have an old-fashioned notion, one that's been the basis of my candidacy and my life's work, that public service is about helping people solve their problems and live their own dreams. This nation has given me every opportunity, and that's what I want for every single American."

Why didn't she just up and concede? I turn the question around. Why should she have? She doesn't need the goodwill of the media--they've never offerred it anyway--, she doesn't need the good will of the Obama supporters who've been demonizing her, and she will remain in the Senate all else fails. And she's using her position as the popular vote leader to force Obama to become a Democratic (not-post-party) partisan. There will be no triagulation on health care, the economy, or the war. Quitters don't win.

Here's what's clear: Sen. Clinton (and to a lesser extent Bill Clinton) are the door through which Sen. Obama must pass to offer unity to the party. If he is going to be the nominee, then it's his duty. She will endorse on her own terms.

And y'all just need to deal with it.

Sen. Clinton is teaching us to be strong. And she is simply doing what every single mother has always done for their children when they had to deal with the choice of themselves, and their children; the gas or the groceries; food or healthcare. And I know because I watched my mom make (and continue to make) those decisions. And she had staying power that resulted in me pursuing my dream of graduate education, and the rest of her children their dreams: in the Air Force (my sister), as an architect (my brother), and to be in the WNBA (my other sister).

If the super-delegates insist on making Sen. Obama the nominee, then I, as one of the authors of this blog, will have little to say about American partisan politics. (President Bush is fair game and I will comment on other stuff.) I am going to think of a plan to banish from the party all the politicians who defected from the popular vote of their constituents to put Obama over the top--especially after all the bellyaching his people did about 'respecting the will of the voters'--and punish them with the loss of office. I am going to remain registered as an independent, and try and get progressive elected down ticket. As JFK once quipped: "Forgive your enemies, but remember their names."

Like Michelle Obama, I had only one candidate I was excited about, and if that candidate leaves the race, then I'll have to wait and see what I will do. I don't want to here a lick about him making history. I've been black all my life and it's nothing new for me. More importantly, making history doesn't pay the bills and it doesn't get every American health care. I voted for an unenthusiastic candidate in 2004, and there is no reason for me to do that again. If the Democratic and Republican parties keep fielding unacceptable candidates, I'm going to restrict myself to only voting in the races in which there are exciting candidates, and do my best to prevent races in which I have to stomach the lesser of two evils. And if you want to send me an angry note saying: "John, it's over" I'll tell you this: On the CNN website, McCain is the presumptive nominee and Obama is the projected nominee. The word difference is what matters.

More importantly, if Clinton is not in the race, I am not going to spend too much time making a case against John McCain (2004 is hopefully the last time I cast my vote to register discontent against someone). Sen. McCain is clear about where he stands, and clear about how we should respond to him. Where John McCain agrees with President Bush, his policy proposals are incompetent; on the points where McCain disagrees with Bush, his policies are reckless.

The Republican Party--of Regan to Bush II--is in shambles, and it is being sucked into the quicksands of political oblivion. The massive political landslide toward the Democrats--I predict 5 (if Obama is the nominee) to 7 (for a unity ticket) to 8 (if Clinton is the nominee) Senate seat and a 20 House seat gain for the Democrats--will break the Republican Party. They will have to rethink, repackage, and purge the dead hands of the paleo- and neo-cons that threaten to drag them down. Gov. Jindal and Gov. Crist--suburban women and Latino voters-- are the future of the party.

So I am not going to vote for, and specifically will advocate against, people voting for the Republican Party if Sen. Obama is the nominee of the Democratic Party. Instead, I am suggesting the following course of action:

(1) only vote downticket for the members of the House and members of the Senate they like. I think turnout should plummet to 5% for the Presidential race, and we should all vote for Congressional and local officials,

(2) Only give money to (i) progressive watchdog organizations that do not endorse Sen. Obama, (ii) local candidates running on the Democratic ticket, (iii) and Sen. Clinton.

(3) Do not tune into any mainstream media on TV; with the exception of the Washington Post and the Christian Science monitor, only read local and foreign press, Clinton's website, and the Clinton blogs.

(4) Contact Super Delegates.

A little spine and dignity is what Sen. Clinton would have asked from us.

2008-06-03T16:14:00.001-07:00

With the Democratic nomination secured for Barack Obama the Dartmouth Observer will retire the short lived Clinton Campaign Mythbuster project in favor of the McCain Mythbusters. I look forward to this being a bipartisan project, as it were, over the coming months. Remember Clinton supporters, working to demonstrate how ridiculous John McCain is not the same thing as supporting Barack Obama.

I’m also announcing the introduction of a regular GIT (Get. It. Together.) rating for the Obama campaign. If the last few weeks have demonstrated anything it is the propensity for the big O to waste, not just days, but weeks on issues that are not his strength and that don’t speak to the needs of the American people. It’s my duty as an Obama supporter, at those moments, to tell his ass to get it together. GITs will be combined with campaign prescriptions when the Obama train veers too far of course, engages John McCain on the war, engages John McCain at all, stops talking to young people, black people or women etc. etc. and unfortunately…etc.

Campaign Prescription for the New Nominee: Get Thee to the Country!

We understand. You wanted to pivot to the General Election early and create as many Obama v. McCain headlines as early and often as possible. Bravo, I suppose, on that. I would’ve been happier had Hugo Chavez, Iran or trips to Iraq not been part of those headlines (GIT!). But you’ve got the nomination and I want your campaign schedule over the next two weeks to be full of trips to suburban to rural Ohio, Indiana, Florida and Michigan. Use that war chest to run the following set of ads

Montage of curious to dubious white voters

Skeptical white person 1: “I like Barack Obama, but I don’t know that much about him.”

Skeptical white person 2: “Isn’t he a Muslim?”

Skeptical white women 3: “I voted for Clinton, but I have so many questions about Obama’s economic policies.”

Skeptical white man 4: “Is he another tax and spend liberal?”

Barack Obama (big smile): Do you still have questions about me? You’re not the only one come to *insert this campaign event* town hall and I’ll do my best to answer them.

I don’t think I even have to convey the genius of this strategy. The national media will swoon, I’ll swoon and skeptical Clinton supporters around the country will take another look. Considering how close a number of swing state polls are just a little more support out of rural areas is enough to put Obama back into landslide victory, so Obama? Get. It. Together.

On Facts and Primaries

2008-06-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

On Facts and Primaries

Has Sen. Clinton won "the big states"? What does "winning the big states" mean?

Kwame mused: "Between the start of the primary season and February 6th the nine largest primaries, based on turnout, were held in CA, NY, IL, MA, NJ, GA, SC, AL and MS, with Obama winning five of the nine."

Really? What an odd way to construct the category of "big states". Big states usually means either:

(1) the bell-weather electoral vote rich states that pass between Democratic and Republican presidents to determine elections, also known as "swing states" or,

(2) the electoral votes/ states that almost any Democratic president will need in her column to reach the White House.

Concerning (1), I'll turn to Gallop:

Clinton's popular-vote victories thus far include the three biggest Electoral College prizes: California (a solid Democratic state), New York (another sure bet for the Democrats), and Texas (a solid Republican state). (Although Obama won more delegates in Texas, Clinton's vote total exceeded Obama's by nearly 100,000 votes.) However, her victories also include several of the largest swing states that both parties will be battling to win in November: Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as wins in the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries. As a result, Clinton's 20 states represent more than 300 Electoral College votes while Obama's 28 states and the District of Columbia represent only 224 Electoral College votes.

(Note that the findings with Michigan and Florida data removed are virtually identical to those shown above. Clinton performs five percentage points better than Obama versus McCain in the states she has won (51% vs. 46%), excluding Michigan and Florida; Obama has virtually no advantage over Clinton versus McCain in the states he has won.)

Thus, when Clinton says "I've won the big states" she sometimes means that she believes that her popular vote victories over Obama in states that encompass three-fifths of national voters augurs better for a Democratic victory with Clinton as the standard bearer than with Obama.

Concerning (2), the Clinton campaign suggests that Clinton does not put in play (against John McCain) states crucial to a Democratic victory: Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, and New Hampshire, with the first three being the 'big states.'

Now the big states don't include the total universe of swing states. Swing states are those that favored neither George W. Bush nor John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election by more than five percentage points. Missouri is also considered a swing state because it has switched sides in the three most recent national elections, voting Democratic in 1996, and Republican in 2000 and 2004. (Bush's lead, if I recall, was about 7% in 2004.) Clinton's 2008 swing-state victories include Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Florida and Michigan. Four of those are delegate rich.

Additionally, Clinton suggests that she puts into play 'red' states that Obama does not: North Carolina, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Kentucky.

Now. Obama's swing-state victories include Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Note, however, from a strategic perspective that (1) only 3 of them were primaries, and (2) collectively they are worth about 50 electoral votes less than Clinton's.

Of Obama's swing states, Clinton only seem to be competitive in Oregon and Missouri. Of Clinton swing state, Obama only seem to be competitive in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

So to return to Kwame's list, only CA, NY, IL, MA, and NJ count as 'big states' for Democrats in the early primary. Of those Clinton won 3 and Obama won 2. If we exclude home state advantage, Clinton won 2 to Obama's 1.

Obama to Democrats: We're For the Popular Will, Except When We're Not

2008-06-02T12:34:00.001-07:00

Obama to Democrats: We're For the Popular Will, Except When We're Not

h/t: Tom In Paine; Politically Drunk

Sunday's NY Times:

"Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who endorsed Mr. Obama nearly two months ago, recently called Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, who has yet to endorse a candidate. “Hey, Ritter!” Mr. Richardson said. “After June 3, it means nothing. Those who take a little bit of a risk, he’ll remember you.”

Automatic Delegates whose constituents voted for Clinton but who endorsed Obama

Robert Cramer – Alabama
Gov. Janet Napalitano – Arizona
George Miller – California
Gerald McNerney – California - Obama Donation $5,000
Fortney Pete Stark – California
Zoe Lofgren – Cal.
Howard Berman – Cal.
Adam Schiff – Cal.
Henry Waxman – Cal
Linda Sanchez – Cal
Joe Donnely – Indiana - Obama $7,500 Donation
Baron Hill – Indiana – Obama $12,500 Donation
Ben Chandler – Kentucky – wow Obama drew less than 10%
Bill Delahunt – Massachussetts
Gov. Deval Patrick Mass.
Sen. Ted Kennedy Mass. - $10,000 from both candidatesS
en. John Kerry – Mass.
Gov. Bill Richardson – New Mexico
Carol Shea-Porter – New Hampshire
Gov. Brad Henry – Oklahoma
Patrick Murphy – PA Donations from Clinton $2500 Obama $18,826
Sen. Bob Casey – PA
Patrick Kennedy – RI
Charlie Gonzalez - Texas
Eddie Johnson - Texas
Rick Boucher – Virginia
Nick Rahal – WV
Sen. Robert Byrd –WV $10,000 from both candidates
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV – WV - Obama $5000 Donation

Uncommitted delegates whose constituents voted for Clinton and those accepting money from Obama.

Sam Farr – Cal.
Jim Costa – Cal. - Obama Donation $5,000
Bob Filner – Cal
Joe Courtney – Connecticut - Obama $5,000 Donation
Gov. Steve Beshear
KentuckyRep. John Oliver – Massachussetts
Rep. Niki Tsongas – Mass. – Obama $5,000 donation
John Tierney – Mass.
Ed Markey – Mass
Travis Childers – Mississippi
Sen. Frank Lautenberg – New Jersey - Obama $9,000
Gov. John Lynch – New Hampshire
Charlie Wilson – Ohio – Obama $7,000
Marci Kaptur – Ohio
Dennis Kucinich – Ohio
Zack Space – Ohio - Obama $7500
Sen. Sherrod Brown – Ohio $10,000 from both
Dan Boren – Oklahoma
Jason Altmire – PA - Obama $10,000
Tim Holden – PA
Gabriel Gifford – Arizona Obama Donation $9,000
Michael Honda – California
Sen. Jack Reed – RI – Obama $5,000
Lincoln Davis – Tennessee
Bart Gordon – Tennessee
Gov. Phil Bredesen – Tenn.
Nick Lampsen – Texas - Obama $5,000
Alan Mollohan – WV
Gov. Joe Manchin – WV

And as for the Pledged Delegates:

h/t Talk Left

35.6 million people have voted
The 37 primary states account for 97% of the vote.
The 13 caucus states account for 3% of the vote.

Bottom line: Clinton’s lead is from 34.5 million voters (97%) in Primaries. Obama’s lead is from 1.1 million voters (3%) in caucuses.

Out of the 50 state elections so far, Clinton has won 20 primaries and Obama has won 17. In comparison, Obama has dominated the Caucus contests by winning 12 of 13, plus the Texas caucus. 42% of his wins are caucus states.

...After 50 election contests to date, Obama leads Clinton by 113 pledged delegates. 97.4% of the difference – 110 delegates – is directly attributable to lopsided victories in caucus contests.

...In the 37 primaries, Hillary Clinton is up 500,000 votes (counting Florida and Michigan and giving Barack Obama 75% of the votes of Michigan's uncommitted delegates.) This give her a 67 delegate lead in the primaries. In the 13 caucus states, Obama is up 300,000 votes which has resulted in a 205 delegate lead.

Appendix:

Elected Officials Voting for Clinton Who’s Constituents Voted for Obama
Michael Thompson – California (Obama won by 500 votes)
Doris Matsui – Cal.
Lynn Woolsey – Cal.
Diane Watson – Cal .
Maxine Walters – Cal.
Laura Richardson – Cal.
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger – Maryland
Gov. Martin O’Malley – Maryland

How To Win Primaries

2008-06-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

How To Win Primaries

Rule 1: Get Your Opponent to Leave (Through Rules Manipulation if Necessary)

When did the calls for the Clinton to leave the race begin? Shortly after the Wisconsin primary, about 10 days before Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont. (I think she won 3 out of the 4 primaries that day.)

Oh, and since Feb 19th, I believe that Sen. Clinton is up about 700k votes and 40 pledged delegates. But I guess it was time for her to go.

And note the tone of CNN. The main-stream media is turning. Oh Democrats, and you thought this would be your year.

Awesome Clinton Speech

2008-06-01T23:35:00.000-07:00

Awesome Clinton Speech

Sen. Clinton just gave another awesome speech in the wake of her crushing victory in Puerto Rico. She also talks about the big states argument, and rightly claims, the popular vote victory. (Please see Real Clear Politics for details.)

Votes with Michigan and Florida as cast: Hillary leads by Clinton 303,785.

Votes with Michigan and Florida as cast and the cacus states estimates for WA, IA, ME and NV which didn't keep track: Hillary leads by 193,563.

Votes with Florida and Michigan, with uncommitted in Michigan going to Obama: Hillary leads by 65,617.

2008-05-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

Clinton Campaign Mythbusters:

With Florida (sort of) counted and in the wake of Harold Ickes explosive, humurous and often cringe worthy response to this weekend's it seems appropriate to assess some of the larger myths that the Clinton campaign will attempt to propogate in coming weeks should she decide to "take this to the convention (Harold, seriously? pull it together). Like many urban legends, some of the following myths are new and others have been so oft repeated they have somehow become political law. None, however, have much basis in fact. In the tradition of this blog I'll be providing a rating system for Clinton Campaign Myths called the "Really?" Myths will be scored on a scale of 1-5 Reallys. In the spirit of In Living Color's "Men on movies" body language bonuses will be added to particularly silly CCMs.

Myth #1, Florida vote coincids with other "big state" wins for Hill.
One of John (and other Clinton Supporter's) favorite rationales for reinstating Florida's full delegation and for adding the Florida tally to the amorphous indefinable "popular vote"argues that the result in Florida reflected the general will of Democratic voters towards the end of January and on Super Tuesday. The margin of Clinton's victory fell in line with her wins in other "big states" that voted on Super Tuesday. Really? What's the evidence for this claim? And does it provide support for Clinton's arguments re the popular vote or, like most justifications for Clinton's continued candidacy, is it as cheaply constructed as a Chinese schoolhouse?

-Big States? Really?
No doubt those who have taken a gander at the Super Tuesday results are just as befuddled by the Clinton camp's big state claims prior to March 4th as I am. Between the start of the primary season and February 6th the nine largest primaries, based on turnout, were held in CA, NY, IL, MA, NJ, GA, SC, AL and MS, with Obama winning five of the nine. I don't think I even need to mention February primaries in places like VA and Wisconsin, oops I did. More importantly, in terms of region, Obama won all of the states surrounding Florida and while the southern tip of the state is uniquely Carribean, the vast majority of the state looks much more like Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina than it does New York or California. Indeed, the much touted Jewish and Latino vote in Florida represent swing constituencies during close Presidential elections, not demographically significant vote changers.

Four Reallys? and a Confused Furrowed Brow.

Florida Demographics Matter....Really?

If it's tough to claim that Clinton won Florida as she did most "big states," election wonks turn to the exit polling to argue that she won similar demographic groups in Florida that she won elsewhere. Thus, sanctioned or not, the popular vote totals would have essentially been the same. There's some argument here, but for the margin of Clinton's victory in Florida considering the state's large African American population. Unlike other southern states on Super Tuesday, Obama only received around 70% of the African American vote in Florida, an acceptable showing had the Florida primary not occured after South Carolina. However, as we all know, S.C. signalled a sea change in black turnout and voting patterns and Obama rarely went below 80% support among black voters from that point forward. Clearly, to paraphrase Bill Nelson, the relentless media campaign which told voters that the Florida election would not count dissuaded African Americans from turning out substantially on January 29th, contributing to Clinton's rather outlandish near 20 point victory in the state.
One Really with a Single Raised Eyebrow

Ferraro Getting It Right

2008-05-30T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ferraro Getting It Right

People have been dumping on Ferraro lately, but I think even Kwame could agree with some of what she says.

Oh, Obama!

2008-05-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

Oh, Obama!

Ambassador Wilson Speaks The Truth

2008-05-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

Ambassador Wilson Speaks The Truth

Ambassador Joe Wilson telling it like it is:

Why Obama Has a Pledged Delegate Lead

2008-05-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

Why Obama Has a Pledged Delegate Lead

Sadly, it seems that Barack Obama wins elections through two tactics: (1) knock his opponent out the race (Alice Palmer, and attempted on Sen. Clinton) and (2) low turnout manipulations.

MyDD did an analysis of the caucus-primary in states that had both (NE, WA, ID, TX) and come up with this. In every state that had both a caucus and a primary, the primary had far greater participation and a stronger vote for Hillary Clinton – this was true in Texas, Washington State and Nebraska. When participation expands, Hillary’s vote expands. The figure plots Hillary's (blue) and Obama's (red) perfomance in the primary in each of those four states (y-axis) vs. their performance in the caucus in each of those four states (x-axis). A linear fit for each of Hillary's and Obama's data is generated (whose equation is given), each of which have a very high R-squared value, indicating a clear correlation.

For example, in the February 9 Nebraska caucus when less than 40,000 people participated, Senator Obama won with 68%, but in the May 13 Democratic primary when more than twice as many people voted – nearly 94,000 – Hillary’s and Senator Obama’s respective votes were 2 points apart (HRC 47 / BHO 49).

The irony of this is Obama is seen as the candidate who has inspired millions to come to the polls seeking change; the reality is that inspirational candidate, Sen. Clinton, is suffering from a caucus state hijacking. If you follow the link on millions, you will note that most caucuses range between 0.3% to 5.2% of registered Democratic voters. (The two exceptions are Nevada, at almost 10%, which Sen. Clinton won, and Iowa at 16%, which Sen. Obama won, but included far more candidates.) Primaries on the other hand, range between 25% to 40% of the eligible voters. (For comparibility purposes, the Michigan primary had a 20% participation rate, the Florida a 33.8%, and Ohio a 40.5%.)

In the states that held both primaries and caucuses, attendance at caucuses averaged 40% of the primary turnout. This is an invitation to distort the results. Consider two examples:

Washington (34%)
238,000 Caucus turnout
691,381 Feb 19 2008 State Primary

Nebraska (41%)
38,571 Caucus Turnout
94,905 May 20 2008 State Primary
41%

The increase in participation in the primaries has been driven by core groups favoring Hillary, led by women, Latinos and older voters. Overall, more than 22 million Democratic primary voters were over the age of 45 this year, compared to less than 10 million who voted in the 2004 Democratic primaries. Women primary voters rose from 7.56 million in the 2004 Democratic primaries to more than 21 million to date in 2008 – from 54% to 58% of the Democratic primary electorate. At the same time, Latinos increased from 9% to 12% of the Democratic primary electorate, from 1.26 million in 2004 to 4.42 million in 2008. In Ohio, for example, women rose from 52% of the Democratic presidential primary voters in 2004 to 59% in 2008. And, in California, Latinos made up 30% of Democratic presidential primary voters in 2008, compared with 16% in 2004. In both the 2000 and 2004 general elections, 17% of voters were under age 30, while the percentage over the age of 45 rose from 50% in 2000 to 54% in 2004. Those results, and the 2008 primaries, suggest that any strategy built on an increase in the Democratic voting base should take into account women, Latinos and seniors.

How do we know that the Democratic Party nominating apparatus has been hijacked? Because Sen. Clinton has won the popular vote and substanitally more counties that Sen. Obama. (She has won 1,654 counties; Senator Obama has won 1,299 counties.) For example, in following states, Hillary won the following number of counties:

State Counties Hillary Won Total Counties in State
Arizona 13 15
Arkansas 72 75
California 39 58
Indiana 83 92
Kentucky 118 120
Missouri 109 115
New Jersey 16 21
New Mexico 27 33
New York (home state) 61 62
Ohio 83 88
Oklahoma 76 77
Pennsylvania 60 67
Tennessee 86 95
Texas 227 254
West Virginia 55 55

Her base extends into more parts of the country – especially rural areas – and offers a key benefit to achieving progressive change: she can assist House and Senate candidates win close elections in these parts of the country. For example, consider this 'primary boost' in the Kentucky Senate race.

Rasmussen. 5/22. Likely voters. MoE 4.5%

McConnell (R) 44
Lunsford (D) 49

Mitch McConnell, of course, is the Republican minority leader in the Senate. This Rasmussen poll was taken 2 days after Kentucky voted in its primary, giving Lunsford a resounding win in the primary to take on McConnell in the fall. But the general excitement and engagement created by the Democratic presidential primary doesn't hurt either. Check out Rasmussen's simple read of why Democrats may have a shot to pick up so many senate seats this cycle.

The underlying reason that so many Republican seats are at risk is that fewer and fewer Americans consider themselves to be Republicans.

Rasmussen elaborates in its May 3 partisan trends analysis:

During the month of April, 41.4% of Americans considered themselves to be Democrats. Just 31.4% said they were Republicans and 27.2% were not affiliated with either major party.
April was the third straight month that the number of Democrats topped 41%. Prior to February of this year, neither party had ever reached the 39% level of support. [...]

The partisan gap now shows the Democrats with a 10.0 percentage point advantage over the Republicans. That's the largest advantage ever recorded by either party. In fact, before these past three months, the previous high was a 6.9 point percentage point edge for the Democrats in December 2006.

The 10.0 percentage point advantage for Democrats is up from a 2.1 point advantage in December.

Remember when the Obama partisans wanted the primary to end and suggested than an extended primary was 'bad' for the party? Clinton, again, proves that it takes a fighter to make a party.

Historically, the Democratic Party’s success – and failure – with presidential nominees has hinged on winning in rural areas. Senator Kerry's underperformance in these areas cost him Ohio (-20 among rural voters); West Virginia (-11); Missouri (-33); and Nevada (-43) – all states with whose rural voters Hillary performs strongly. According to a recent poll conducted in NH, PA, OH, MI, WI, IA, MN, MO, FL, VA, CO, NM and NV by Greenberg Quinlan & Rosner and Greener & Hook for the Center for Rural Strategies, Hillary and Senator McCain both enjoy the support of rural America. Hillary ties Senator McCain among rural voters, who cast 23% of general election ballots; Senator Obama trails Senator McCain by 9 points with the same voters. Furthermore, Hillary has won 10 of the 15 districts rated “toss-ups” for 2008 by the Cook Political Report. They are: • AL 05 • PA 10 • TX 22 • AZ 01 • MS 01 • NJ 03 • NY 25 • NY 26 • OH 15 • OH 16. Without her strength, and indeed, if there is a rejection of Obama, we could lose.

More De-Programming

2008-05-28T22:12:00.000-07:00

Reality Check: Obama DOES Has A Problem With White Working Class Voters And It's Not an Appalachia Problem

Sometimes I feel like a one-man army trying to rid people of their illusions about politics.

Today, I want to address this new meme that has developed: Obama's problem with poor (white) working class voters is limited to Appalachia. (That's a very polite way of saying "Those people are racists.")

As Markos notes, Montana is an overwhelmingly White state. Likewise, it's one of the poorer states in the nation. So Obama's 17-point lead in the state seems to undercut the notion that he performs particularly poorly among working class Whites outside of Appalachia (a fact underscored by Obama's similarly large victory in Oregon last week). (emphasis added)

The CNN Exit (Telephone) Poll of Oregon shows something very different. Obama won the state by 18 points, and won all income groups earning over $30,000 a year. However, Clinton won those making between $15,000-$30,000 a year by a 54-45 margin with those making less than $15,000 a year not. Slicing the demographic another way, Clinton won by a 53-46 margin those who had graduated high school but not attended college with hose who didn't graduate high school not polled.

How is this not the white working class of Oregon? In an overwhelmingly white state, lower income voters, and those who have not benefitted from higher education would seem to qualify as the very category we have been talking about. And unless we are going 'Obama geography'--in which Arkansas is closer to Kentucky than Illinois is--then we have to acknowledge that this is him losing the working class vote in a place no where near Appalachia.

Why the Obama Wing Hates the Clinton Wing

2008-05-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

Why the Obama Wing Hates the Clinton Wing

The race for the Democratic nomination is as much about winning in November, for some, as it is about purging the Clintons and their supporters from the Democratic Party. If you have been wondering why so many otherwise intelligent people have displayed symptoms of Clinton Derangement Syndrome (CDS), then this fact--that this primary election is a battle for the control of the Democratic Party--is one you must acknowledge.

I think the timeless Anglachel said it best:

To acknowledge the legitimacy of the Democratic constituency that supports Hillary would mean relinquishing the prejudices of the Stevensonian wing against the Jacksonian, something I have been discussing for the last two months. First and foremost, it means rejecting the argument that this part of our party is nothing more than bigots and racists slavering for the chance to betray us to the Republicans. It means dropping the code of "hicks" and "Applachian problems", and taking seriously the need to defend the economic interests of this constituency. (Something Hillary does with her discussion of growing a green technology sector, for example) It would mean accepting that "The South" is part of Democratic politics and is a challenge to be embraced, not an impediment to be cast aside.

What's worse, though, is that many fauxgressives (they call themselves 'progressives') would rather lose with Obama than win with Clinton.

Anglachel again:

[O]ffering Hillary the VP slot, is a bigger step because it would mean extending power to a rival who represents what you most detest, complicated by the fact that your detestation is not even rational. Looking at the collective psychotic fantasy of Hillary as would-be assassin that is welling up from the Obamacan faction, it is equally fascinating and repellant as an image of the structure of their collective demonology. The crime that is latent within their own hearts is ascribed to another. It speaks about the way in which they see themselves and their political opponents, innocent and vulnerable victims on the one side and rapacious, murderous monsters on the other. The problem with "unity" in this campaign has always been the structure of the psychosis of the anti-Clinton faction. Their unity is grounded in a fantasy of defeating something thast simply does not exist. This is why, at base, the obsessions of this faction makes those of us more firmly based in reality (whether or not we support Hillary) look askance at the Obamacans; if their current political opponent is an "enemy", a deeply distorted projection of their own inner fears, then what boundaries can there be on their relations with other who may disagree with their opinions, goals and objectives?

To sincerely (no matter how reluctantly) offer the position of VP to the person who is equally supported by just as large a portion of the party as you are is the only way to begin bringing people back to the party rather than driving them away because they scare you. If offered, I think Hillary would take it. Why? Because she has done the long-term math and knows that she can power the ticket to victory, sweeping in an overwhelming Democratic majority in both houses, and that she would have done this for the sake of the party and her constituents. Obama can try to bottle her up in the VP office but I don't see him being very effective on that count. And that, of course, is why the offer is unlikely to be made. It would make his victory dependent on her presence and it would further legitimize her part of the party, which is the diametric opposite of what the anti-Clinton wing wants to do. They would be forever in her debt.

But, we're looking at a lady or tiger situation here, or rather a co-dependent win with the lady and a crushing defeat you will never recover from tiger. Fail to seat Hillary's supporters while their votes still count and you lose in November. Seat them and you risk losing the delegate lead and get relegated to VP. (And, yes, Hillary will make Obama her VP without batting an eye.) If you still somehow managed to squeak out the delegate count, you instantly make her VP, thereby legitimizing your biggest political opponent, or you lose in November. There's no recovery from that. Failing to give respect and power where it is due only strengthens your opponent for the next round.

The actual political battle being fought this electoral year is whether or not the Democratic Party is willing to abandon its elitist politics of resentment against its own working class core and take that part of the population back from the Republicans. That means abandoning fantasies of Whole Foods Nation and living in archipelagos of urbanity where you can be ironically detached from the events of the dirty world beyond your redoubt. It means rejecting "unity" predicated upon a purge of what frustrates you in the party coalition. It means relinquishing your dearly held fantasies of the evil demons out to get you, and accepting that you will have to compromise with others to get things done.

Obamacans need to grow the fuck up and jettison their juvenile paranoid conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, who has done nothing except run a tough campaign. As Krugman conlcudes:

the nightmare Mr. Obama and his supporters should fear is that in an election year in which everything favors the Democrats, he will nonetheless manage to lose.

And what's driving this? Besides the African-American vote, income among whites. That's right, the Democratic Party is divided between whether it wants to the party of the working poor or whether it wants to be an island of Whole Foods Nations trying to churn out supermajorities. From Jay Cost:

our expectation is that socioeconomic status should have no effect on the African American vote. Indeed, statistical testing confirms that it probably does not. To date, the only significant factor affecting the African American vote that I have been able to identify is time. Obama has done better with these voters as time has passed.
What is the implication of this? It is that, among white voters, socioeconomic status permeates the Obama v. Clinton contest. It seems that one's inclination to vote for a candidate does not depend simply upon age and gender, but age and gender in the context of socioeconomic status. These factors interact with one another to produce (ultimately) a vote choice. White youth are more likely to vote for Obama than white women or men of all ages, but the particular likelihood that a white youth will vote for Obama also depends upon his or her socioeconomic status. Ditto white females. They are less likely to vote for Obama than white males or white youths, but the likelihood increases with socioeconomic status.
All in all, Obama's coalition seems to depend in large part upon African Americans, [rich] white youths, and upscale whites generally.

Like I've said too many times before, there's too much at stake for me, my financially strapped African-American single-mom family who have already fallen the trapdoor that is the Bush Economy, and my own tenuous place in the lower middle class (as a grad student from a poor family) for me to support the transformation of the Democratic Party into an upper middle class cathedral of white guilt and black middle class pretensions.

If the Democratic Party can not see that, then we ought to punish them with four years of John McCain and clean our own house. No more caucuses, no more dominance by an alliance of latte- and limousine liberals (the so-called 'creative class'), and no more bamboozling.

CNN, A Little Late

2008-05-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

CNN Finally Acknowledges the Misogyny

There are a lot of people who truly believe that Sen. Clinton is willfully trying to deceive the American public about the amount of sexism in the media and on the campaign trail. CNN has finally decided to acknowledge the media's (MSNBC's) role in all this.

h/t By The Fault; Corrente | Boldly shrill ...

Negative Campaigning?

2008-05-26T13:11:00.001-07:00

Negative Campaigning?

The conventional wisdom is that Sen. Clinton ran an extraordinarily negative campaign. I submit these to you.

I think the Politico put it best:

Why, ask many Democrats and media commentators, won’t Hillary Rodham Clinton see the long odds against her, put her own ambitions aside, and gracefully embrace Barack Obama as the inevitable Democratic nominee?

Here is why: She and Bill Clinton both devoutly believe that Obama’s likely victory is a disaster-in-waiting. Naive Democrats just don’t see it. And a timid, pro-Obama press corps, in their view, won’t tell the story.

But Hillary Clinton won’t tell it, either.

Far from a no-holds-barred affair, the Democratic contest has been an exercise in self-censorship.

Rip off the duct tape and here is what they would say: Obama has serious problems with Jewish voters (goodbye Florida), working-class whites (goodbye Ohio) and Hispanics (goodbye, New Mexico).

Republicans will also ruthlessly exploit openings that Clinton — in the genteel confines of an intraparty contest — never could. Top targets: Obama’s radioactive personal associations, his liberal ideology, his exotic life story, his coolly academic and elitist style.

… one argument seems indisputably true: Obama is on the brink of the Democratic nomination without having had to confront head-on the evidence about his general election challenges.

That is why some friends describe Clinton as seeing herself on a mission to save Democrats from themselves. Her candidacy may be a long shot, but no one should expect she will end it unless or until every last door has been shut.

…there is reason to question whether he would be able to perform at average levels with other main pillars of the traditional Democratic coalition: blue-collar whites, Jews and Hispanics. He has run decently among these groups in some places, but in general he’s run well behind her.

Obama lost the Jewish vote by double-digits in Florida, New York and Maryland — and that was before controversy over anti-Israel remarks of Wright.

Does it seem odd that a woman with a polarizing reputation would be rolling up enormous margins among some of the country’s most traditional voters? Three out of every four blue-collar whites in small towns and rural areas of Ohio voted for Clinton over Obama on March 4. The reality is, this is already an electorate with deep cultural divisions — and that’s in the Democratic Party.

Add to that her massive wins in WV and KY and her convincing win in PA.

The last two Democratic nominees, Al Gore and John F. Kerry, were both military veterans, and both had been familiar, highly successful figures in national politics for more than two decades by the time they ran.

Both men lost control of their public images to the right-wing freak show — that network of operatives and commentators working mostly outside of the mainstream media — and ultimately lost their elections as many voters came to see them as elitist, out-of-touch, phony, and even unpatriotic.

Obama is a much less familiar figure than Kerry or Gore, with a life story that is far more exotic, who is coming out of a political milieu in Chicago politics that is far more liberal.

The freak show has already signaled its early lines of attack on Obama. Polls show a significant percentage of Americans believe — falsely — that he is a Muslim. Voter interviews reveal widespread unease with minor and seemingly irrelevant questions like why he does not favor American flag pins on his lapel. Nor have we heard the last about Wright and his fulminations.

Here will be the real kitchen sink: every damaging comment or association from Obama’s past, mixed together with innuendo and downright fiction, to portray him as an an exotic character of uncertain values and weak patriotism.

Obama is indeed poised and self-confident. But the current uproar over his impromptu sociology lesson in San Francisco about “bitter” voters in Pennsylvania raise questions about his self-discipline, and his understanding of how easy it is for a politicians in modern politics to lose control of his or her public image.

Day of Remembrance

2008-05-26T11:20:00.000-07:00

Day of Remembrance

It's Memorial Day. Let us each take a moment of silence to honor those who have died.

According to a CNN count, as of 23 May 2008, 4,391 Coalition troops have died in Iraq. That's 4,079 Americans, two Australians, 176 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, one Czech, seven Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, four Georgians, one Hungarian, 33 Italians, one Kazakh, one Korean, three Latvian, 22 Poles, three Romanians, five Salvadoran, four Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians.

It's time to end this war.

A catchy reminder of who can do that: Don't Mess With Hill.

Speaking for Me

2008-05-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

Speaking for Me

Usually, I can only speak for myself, but lately I'm finding a lot of other people who speak for me.

On TaylorMarsh.Com

I am 29 year old female serving in the United States Army. I am black. I am proud. And I am a supporter of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

To attempt to destroy the reputation, the name of the former First Lady and Senator by falsely portraying her supporters as racist is one of the worst mistakes of the 2008 election process. To use the the history and the struggles in the black community to destroy another person's political career is the worst form of politics imaginable.
The media is slowly destroying the black community with their words. MSNBC should fire Keith Olbermann and let him return to being a radio sportscaster. They are ripping the Democratic Party apart and they are dividing this nation. Any sane, reasonable and coherent person can see that the cries of "racism" are their attempts to get Senator Clinton to leave this race. By any means necessary. Therefore any sane, reasonable and coherent person watching this debacle is going to resent what is happening, because anyone can see that Senator Clinton is being railroaded.

African Americans are not in any way stupid. If we believed that there was this level of racial discourse as these pundits make it out to be we would be marching on Washington D.C. But now we can only watch in horror as the media destroys our history. The only ones who are "outraged" are those who have no idea of true racial hatred.

How many black civil rights leaders have you seen in the media, on NBC, MSNBC, and CNN, that have stated that the former President and First Lady are racists? None. But we should believe analysts such as David Gergen, commentators such as Keith Olbermann and reporter Andrea Mitchell who get on television and tell you so? On 27 April, "Meet the Press" NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell boldly stated that racism was a "real factor" in the Obama vote on the ground in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Apparently because many voters are racist they have a "willingness to believe totally erroneous things about Senator Obama," like he didn't put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. So my next question is, where is the evidence for the "I vote for Senator Clinton and I am racist who clings to my gun and bible" scientific poll to determine who is racist or who is not? So the next time the Obama campaign gives you talking points make sure you understand what you're reading and saying before you open your mouth and say it.

For those of you who don't know, there is a movement happening behind the scenes and it's one that is moving fast and one that is strong. It was born from watching this historic election with our nation having its first viable female contender for the position of Commander in Chief take hit after hit, day after day, while she attempts to fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, when the party in question will not stand up and fight for her.

It was born from watching the little girls with big dreams, and those that are already living the American dream. It came from the mothers who can barely make ends meet and do without just so their families can barely get by. It's from the blue collar workers who just lost their jobs. It was born from the heroes and sheroes deploying to the same place year after year with no end in sight. It came from the ones who want to give up, but find a way to keep on going. It started from the ones who have been constantly knocked down, but keep getting back on their feet. It came from those moving forward that never look back...
The 2008 primary and general election is historic for many reasons. It's the chance of having either the first female or black president. But the most important aspect and notable accomplishment for me will be the official date, the official time, the exact moment the Democratic Party died for me.

The party I thought I knew ceased to exist the moment, the minute and the second they allowed the first most qualified female presidential candidate in our nation's history to be attacked, destroyed, and ripped apart, which reached a tipping point this weekend. As of 24 May 2008 0930hrs, I no longer belong to the Democratic Party. I will no longer be affiliated with any group or group(s), person or person(s), that would allow a party member to be falsely accused of allegations that bears no relevance or has no relationship to the situation at hand. I will not be part of a party that utilizes character assassination to achieve a goal. I will not quietly sit by and watch the destruction of my chosen candidate. I will not support, vote, or show any loyalty to those who sit quietly aside and allow this to be played out in the court of public opinion. The Party I once knew I know no longer. Today I turn my back on the Democratic Party, because by allowing the falsehoods against Hillary Clinton to be embellished as they have the Democratic Party has turned its back on me.

From A Little Night Musing:

I don't always agree with [Big Tent Democrat] on everything, but he understands very well the alienation a lot of us have felt and that there is a need to do something about it.
I started out long ago torn between supporting Clinton and supporting Obama, and as must be obvious from my comments at [TalkLeft] I've come to feel more and more difficulty facing the prospect of Obama being the nominee, based entirely on his comments and actions and the comments and actions of those acting on his behalf (that is, putting aside the blog commenters). This is a problem that I've said repeatedly he's got to own. He and his campaign have made a few little feints toward reconciling with me and voters who feel as I do recently, but it's way too little and way too late and comments like the one about MI/FL being something Clinton stirred up just go to undermining it.
Being a woman and a long-time voter (voted as an 18-year-old in the first Presidential election in which it was legal to do so) and activist (against wars from Viet Nam on, and on poverty issues) the feeling I've gotten from Obama and his campaign (and again, ignoring the bloggers and commenters for a moment) is that I'm part of a failed past along with Hillary and Bill Clinton and should just silently go off to retirement and let him and his Unity Pony (including Republicans!!!) take things over. I'm exaggerating a little, but not much. And that, frankly, makes me angry. I've been working hard to make this country a better place all my life for me and my community, and now I'm being treated as irrelevant by the candidate who claims to represent change and hope.
This is "only" a question of tone, but it's a big one. Why should reaching across the aisle to Republicans be more important than reaching out to people like me?
Obama could still do something about this, but only if he realizes what a problem it is and that it's not just going to go away, and certainly not with a few little tepid attempts at outreach. And "guilting" me into supporting him will definitely not work and will only increase my sense of alienation.
I don't know that I want Clinton to be VP - I'd much rather see her at the top of the ticket, or as Senate Majority leader - but it may be the only meaningful move he could make at this point. It would also need to be clear that this is a unity ticket in every sense of the word, that Clinton would have a strong voice in the administration as well. (The idea that she becomes somehow irrelevant to national politics if she doesn't get the nomination, after having run a campaign that kept it so squeaky-close, is one I find bizarre.)
Sorry this is so long. I guess a lot had been building up and it just kind of boiled over this morning.

From Big Tent Democrat:

There is now a great divide in the Democratic Party - there is an Obama Wing and Clinton Wing - divided equally in votes in the contests. Despite claims to the contrary by the Obama News Network (NBC) and Obama blogs, the split is almost precisely even. This has been the closest nomination race ever. And in key swing states, it can be strongly argued that the Clinton Wing is significantly larger. The question the Democratic Party and its likely nominee must ask is this - do you want to win without Clinton Democrats and do you think you CAN win without Clinton Democrats?
Me, I do not want to take any unneccessary risks regarding winning the Presidency in November. It seems there is a whole class of pundits, Democrats and Obama supporters who really really despise the Clinton sooo much that they are willing to risk the Presidency to drive the Clintons out of the Party.

Oh they will couch their arguments in terms of baggage and Bill Clinton (as if the only two term Democratic President of the last 50 years would somehow be a problem for a Democratic campaign, it is mind boggling). But what they want is the Clinton Wing of the Democratic Party gone - dead and buried.

They despise the Clintons so much, they seem willing to risk the Presidency to destroy them. I find this attitude simply irresponsible. Just as I despise those Clinton supporters who say they won't vote for Obama, I equally despise those Obama supporters who would rather destroy the Clintons than win the Presidency.

From Brookhaven:

[It's like Alice in Wonderland.] Up is down, backward is forward, crazy is sane and so on...
One of the things that this country has got to be careful of is the mob mentality which has been in swing since Obama won in Iowa and which is now at a fever pitch this mob mentality. And, the mob has been yelling and sreaming for HRC to GET OUT! And, the mob mentality voices are drowning out the rational voices and will march us all over the cliff of insanity if this doesn't stop.
HRC stays in this race because she's earned it just as he has although I know some will refute that about him. Mostly because of his winning so many caucuses and how he was awarded more delegates in those caucuses (the most undemocratic system) which represented a paucity of popular votes compared to HRC who was awarded fewer delegates but won a huge amount in the popular vote. And, then, HRC won less delegates than Obama in a State like Texas although she won there. That is Alice in Wonderland to the ne plus ultra if ever there was a ne plus ultra. Is it any wonder why so many of us are angry and disillusioned and add to that the horrific behavior from many quarters towards HRC and her supporters. I'll never forget that. Never.
In the 2000 POTUS GE in Florida, democracy took a sucker punch to the guts and was weakened considerably and has yet to recover since it continued to get sucker punched over the last seven years including during these primaries. The Forth Estate was supposed to act like the forth branch of the gov, the real watchdog over abuse of power, etc. The Forth Estate is now mostly an outhouse because most have now become threats to our democracy as they have become open advocates of one candidate over another. Who is their watchdog but us?
How do we boot them out? By not buying their newspapaers, tuning into their broadcasts (Keith Olbermann is sick and for him to actually believe he's Murrow is evidence of just how mentally unhinged this man is), not clicking on their blogs, etc.
These cheap, malicious, seriously mental and woefully overpaid morons have been largely responsible for the rancid, toxic political atmosphere because of their morbid hatred of everything Clinton especially HRC.
What she has endured from these parasites and what she has endured from her own party and the crowned Elmer Gantry, Obama and many of his supporters on blogs and on the stump has been unseemly and herculian in it's scope. And, she's come out on the stronger end of it all. She's more than survived she's thrived and become a great candidate whose voice speaks for so many of us and whose voice is so eloquent and scary smart. She's got what it takes to be the leader of the free world and she is the only one now who can lead us out of the serious mess we're in, domestically and internationally. She's the only one.
I'm a woman and her being a woman is the ribbon on top. I'm not voting for her because she is a woman but because she is the most qualified person running in decades to be POTUS and I believe she will be one of the great President's. And, this is a statistical tie between her and Obama and she shouldn't stop. To stop now and throw that away and in this most precarious time in our history is not only foolhardy but a tragedy for our country and the world. And, she loves her country and is running for POTUS because she has the better ideas and wants to make it better for us. It's not for the power alone. And, with due respect, that is how I feel about Obama based upon his quick rise to the "top". That he has no basic principles, will go with the wind, or changing wind and wants power for power sake and not to use his power for the good of us.
HRC stays in and fights as she has been doing and I'm there to support her all the way into the convention if need be. And, historically she will not be setting a precedent. The only reason she is being treated differently with all the catcalls and whining babies yelling and nipping at her to leave the contest is because she's not got a Y chromosome and most of us know it.
The rampant sexism thrown at her and us as women and the men who have been offended by it, will come back to haunt this country as the world is watching us very closely and how she has been treated. Some in the British press have already commented on this. And, the DNC sat back and still sits back and says not a word. They will pay for this silence.
Some have said that the high percentage of HRC's supporters who said they won't vote for Obama in Nov should HRC not win the Dem nom will come back into the fold as they have before. These pundits and the DNC and Obama supporters who are the reasonable ones (and have not behaved like the mob did) who are calling for unity and think there will be a coming together are wrong. This Democratic Party schism is very different and more bone deep from what happened in the last two elections. And I'm afraid the vast majority who said (possibly in the heat of the moment) that they wouldn't vote for Obama (not because they are racists which has been the red herring and shamelessly has been played up more than it deserved while the sexist hits kept on hitting)will not vote for him in Nov should he be the nominee.
What happened here goes way beyond hurt feelings and licking wounds. Way beyond.
One thing that would go a long way in healing that political schism is for Obama to agree to have the votes in Florida and Michigan, the popular votes and delegate counts stand as is before he and his chorus in the media (old and new) and in the DNC once again declare him the winner. Count the votes before June 3rd or on June 3rd.
Be that as it may, I remember like someone just hit me with an anvil, I remember the night of the Nov 2000 election thinking Gore had won and then it was taken away from him like bad magic. And, then the horrific weeks that followed and the GOP clean-cut thugs banging on the doors where people were counting votes. That image is apoxied to my brain.
And, then we got Bush 2. Never again. And, the DNC should be now be ashamed for what they did to Florida and Michigan but especially Florida because they too should have had in the back of their collective heads "never again" will our Dem voters be disenfranchised because we are not the GOP. We stand for all votes being counted. Kind of hits them in their arses now doesn't it? But, I'll give them a chance to regroup and think right and on May 31st to at long last decide to count all the votes as is, votes that were State certified as legitimate and true.
It's ironic that the May 31st vote comes a little less than one week after the HBO film "Recount" airs tonight. I hope the DNC and all parties involved in this and all of us who care deeply about our country and the fate of democracy in our country watch this film and remember what happened and what the GOP did to the Dems. And, now it could happen once again this time Dem on Dem. I can't imagine they will let it go that far. And, if they do, they will have lost much more than many, many core Dems. Much, much more.

Young People Working Their Hearts Out For Their Future

2008-05-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

Young People Working Their Hearts Out For Their Future

Let's Stand Up Against Media Bias

2008-05-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Let's Stand Up Against Media Bias

As we inch closer to the November 2008 election, more citizens are becoming aware of the deleterious effect of the corporate media echo chamber.

Let's let the media know that their sexist and racist coverage doesn't sell--because we are not buying it.

Join Media Matters and Women's Media Center today, and sign the petition against sexism. If you've ever given a dime to a campaign in the last twenty years, it would be worth your money to contribute $25 a year to Media Matters.

From Women's Media Center:

In the video released today, “Sexism Sells, But We’re Not Buying It,” The Women’s Media Center and its partners including Media Matters and the National Women’s Political Caucus document 30 examples of gendered, sexist coverage from the mainstream media (far from an exhaustive list). From jokes about a woman’s appearance to specific gendered insults, some media professionals this election season have fallen far short of their responsibility to report and educate.

Women are a driving force in the U.S. economy with a purchasing power of more than $7 trillion a year, and purchase fully 82 percent of all products and services in the U.S. Earlier this year, The Women’s Media Center joined NOW, the Feminist Majority, and the National Women’s Political Caucus to speak out against the particularly egregious remarks Chris Matthews made about Hillary Clinton’s campaign, when he said that “the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around” (MSNBC's Morning Joe, January 9, 2008). Speaking for more than 15 million women across the United States, the coalition secured an on-air apology from Matthews, and assurances from NBC executives that steps were being taken to address the situation. Yet the situation persists, which is why The Women’s Media Center is taking this next step, releasing a video and launching an online petition campaign to allow women to speak out against this continuing sexism.

The Women’s Media Center is working to make sure that issues of gender and media do not slide to the backburner. For more information on The Women’s Media Center and to join our campaign to make women more visible and powerful in the media, please visit www.womensmediacenter.com/sexism_sells.html.

If you are tired of the distractions, then we, together, need to band together to fund a progressive network capable of holding the media, our elected representatives, and our executive accountable for their behavior.

It's time for this to end.

Speaking Truth To Power: Maps and Math

2008-05-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

Speaking Truth To Power: Maps and Math

It doesn't get clearer than this.

Is He the One we've been waiting for?

From Hominid:

Obama	McCain
37.1% probability of winning	62.0% probability of winning
Mean of 264 electoral votes	Mean of 274 electoral votes

Here is the distribution of electoral votes [FAQ] from the simulations:

10000 simulations: Obama wins 37.1%, McCain wins 62.0%.
Average ( SE) EC votes for Obama: 264.1 ( 14.6)
Average (SE) EC votes for McCain: 273.9 ( 14.6)
Median (95% CI) EC votes for Obama: 263 (241, 294)
Median (95% CI) EC votes for McCain: 275 (244, 297)

Clinton	McCain
100.0% probability of winning	0.0% probability of winning
Mean of 320 electoral votes	Mean of 218 electoral votes

On Friday, Sen. Hillary Clinton had a 99.9% chance of defeating Sen. John McCain in an election held then. Today after the release of five new polls, Clinton’s chances have increased ever so slightly.

After 10,000 simulated elections, Clinton wins 10,000 times (and there were no ties). What does this mean? It means that the state head-to-head polls used to generate a simulated election indicate that Clinton would win a general election held now. That is, her expected win of 320 electoral votes is well above the “margin of error” (or sampling variability).

This doesn’t mean she wins with certainty in November…it means she would win in an election held right now.

Here is the distribution of electoral votes [FAQ] from the simulations. Notice that the distribution sits way above the 269 electoral votes Clinton needs to win:

10000 simulations: Clinton wins 100.0%, McCain wins 0.0%.
Average ( SE) EC votes for Clinton: 320.2 ( 12.9)
Average (SE) EC votes for McCain: 217.8 ( 12.9)
Median (95% CI) EC votes for Clinton: 321 (295, 344)
Median (95% CI) EC votes for McCain: 217 (194, 243)

Highlights from The Clinton Victory Speech

2008-05-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

Highlights from The Clinton Victory Speech

You can find the text of the speech here.

Your support has made the difference between victory and defeat. Though we have been outspent massively, your support has helped us make our case on the air and on the ground, and your help will keep us going. We've made it this far together, so please go to HillaryClinton.com and together we will make history.

Why do millions keep turning out to vote in the face of naysayers and skeptics? Because you know that our political process is more than candidates running or the pundits chattering or the ads blaring. It's about the path we choose as a nation and whether or not we will solve our toughest problems, whether or not we will have a president who will rebuild the economy, end the war in Iraq, restore our leadership in the world, and stand up for you every single day.
And, you know, the people I meet along the campaign trail don't always make the headlines: the nurses and teachers, the truckers and soldiers, the waitresses and firefighters, the police officers and coal miners, the college students and line workers, the men and women who get up every single day, work hard to make a difference for their families, the people struggling to make ends meet, to find a good job, to pay the bills, to have a shot at the American dream.
For too long, too many Americans have felt invisible in their own country. Well, you've never been invisible to me. I've been fighting for you my entire life.
We are in this race because we believe everyone deserves a shot at the American dream, the opportunity to work hard at a good job to get ahead, to save for college, for a home, for retirement, to fill the gas tank, and buy the groceries with a little left at the end of each month to build a better life for you and your children.
We are in this race because we believe this new century poses new challenges to meet and new opportunities to seize, if we only had a president ready, willing, and able to lead and turn the climate crisis into an energy revolution and create millions of new jobs, to turn the risks of the new global economy into the rewards of new prosperity shared by all of our people.
We are in this race because we believe it will take a commander- in-chief with the strength and knowledge to end the war in Iraq, safely and quickly, and a president with experience, representing the people of the United States in more than 80 countries, to restore our leadership and moral authority in the world.
And, yes, we are in this race because we believe America is worth fighting for. This continues to be a tough fight, and I have fought it the only way I know how: with determination, by never giving up and never giving in.
I have done it -- I have done it not because I've wanted to demonstrate my toughness, but because I believe passionately that, for the sake of our country, the Democrats must take back the White House and end Republican rule.
This country needs our combination of strength and compassion to help people struggling with their bills, living the hard reality of everyday life, in need of our leadership on issues from health care to energy to Social Security.
That's why I'm still running, and that's why you're still voting.
Neither Senator Obama nor I has won the 2,210 delegates required to secure the nomination. And because this race is so close, still separated by less than 200 delegates out of more than 4,400, neither Senator Obama nor I will have reached that magic number when the voting ends on June the 3rd.
And tonight I'm thinking about all of the women I've met who were born before women could vote. Just this week, I met 89-year-old Emma Hollis (ph), an African-American woman. She has seen so many barriers crumble and fall in her lifetime, but she's not finished yet.
She's been volunteering out of our campaign office in Covington to help our campaign break the highest and hardest glass ceiling in the land.
I'm thinking about Andrea Spiegel (ph), a strong and composed young woman, 20 years old, who drove across Kentucky to meet me. Her husband, Justin, is deployed in Afghanistan. And she told me how important it is that we have a president who will always stand up for our veterans. And I'm honored by her support and by her family's service and sacrifice.
That's why I'm in this race: to fight for your future. And that's why, whatever happens, I'll work as hard as I can to elect a Democratic president this fall.
You know, the state motto of Kentucky is, "United we stand, divided we fall," words that have a special place in our history. They inspire American revolutionaries to unite the colonies, to defy an empire, and create a new nation, to invent a new form of government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, and they bound our nation together in service and sacrifice, even in our darkest hours.
We will come together as a party, united by common values and common cause, united in service of the hopes and dreams that know no boundaries of race or creed, gender or geography. And when we do, there will be no stopping us.
We won't just unite our party. We will unite our country and make sure America's best years are still ahead of us.

An amazing speech!

The Map, Not The Math

2008-05-19T20:03:00.000-07:00

The Map, Not The Math

Needless to say, I am tired of the main-stream media and blogosphere extraordinare competing to describe just how dead Clinton is. Team Clinton has rightly begun to explicitly state is newest argument: it's the map not the math. Whether in terms of counties won, or all of the votes cast for a candidate in this primary season, or the number of 'important'/'swing' states won, Sen. Clinton has exceeded expectations. While things would certainly be easier if she were ahead in other three metrics--pledged delegates, superdelegates, and states won--she does has a solid grip on three of the six measures.

Nevertheless, it is easy to get lost in all this math and these inane arguments about 'rules.' The Democratic Party has two questions it must resolve: (1) what is the party going to do about the certified elections that occurred in Michigan and Florida? (2) Given the closeness of this primary race--neither candidate has been able to deliver the knockout blow--which candidate, or combination of the candidates, is the most competitive in the 2008 November election?

This is a measurement that can only occur, as I have argued earlier, by each state's contribution to an Electoral College victory. Quite frankly, I am of the opinion that Sen. Clinton is the clear choice and here's why. Her electoral victory map represents a more sure shot of a Democratic presidency.

Polls consistently show Obama winning and Hillary losing in the following states:

Colorado
Iowa

Polls show Hillary winning and Obama losing in the following states:

Florida
Ohio
West Virginia
Arkansas

Obama's states = 16 electoral votes
Hillary's victories= 58 electoral votes.

Obama's states + the Kerry map results in an electoral college loss.
Hillary's states + the Kerry map results in an electoral college victory.

(For comparison, see Karl Rove's polling company's results.)

It's that simple. It's the difference between winning (Hillary) and losing (Obama).

Let me be clear: Obama can win; Clinton will win. The deep irony of the situation is that the Republicans nominated their only candidate who could win this year while the Democrats seem intent on nominating the only remaining candidate who could lose.

Clearly Sen. Obama has proven his worth as a candidate: his nomination to the vice presidency would make the Democratic ticket an unstoppable force for up to four presidential elections, and for many congressional elections as well.

Obama, MIA in West Virginia and Kentucky

2008-05-09T22:41:00.001-07:00

Obama, MIA in West Virginia and Kentucky

I’m sorry Obama, but is it that you just can’t be bothered? What else can explain your M.I.A. status in West Virginia and Kentucky. Yes you needed to show a sign of strength. The rock star moment in the house was a nice touch, I think we can all appreciate the theater in that. And kudos on your excellent small crowd townhall on the economy, education and the war in Iraq in Beaverton Portland. You are introducing yourself to people and making use of local television, awesome. This is how you win in liberal Pac Northwest states where Independents are going to be most likely to switch to you.

But get your ass into West Virginia and Kentucky right the hell now! This is a huge blunder. There’s the potential that these white voters will not vote for you because you are black but make an effort for everyone. It’s not going to change their minds about you. It will change the minds of millions of Clinton supporters in other states who need reassurances that you care about them, and with a quickness.

Also there needs to be a serious Obama and the press situation where Obama publicly calls on his supporters to reach out to Clinton supporters in order to unite the party. You are going to run on changing politics, then this is an excellent opportunity to do that. You have a voter registration drive and energized volunteers. Operation Care for Hillary supporters will launch you among the women vote and get some sensitive husbands too. If you can get all the women in the country voteing for you then you have a major chance. Just as black women would’ve been more easily brought into the fold, the same is true for white women. Sisterhood moves both ways even if there are serious social gaps between them. Single moms alone could change this election. So Obama needs to think women, women, women. Appealing to women Clinton supporters, talking about issue women care about. You’re gonna get the liberal men and the black men and the white men under 33. Maybe you can’t get men back. But you can get women back. Make that a priority and you’ll solve this “irreparable damange.” Be impractical about gender and you could throw it away.

Exit pols are scary

2008-05-07T07:49:00.000-07:00

When Exit Polls become Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

In recent weeks my own naiveté, hallmark of the Obama faithful, encouraged me to reject punditry and accept the notion that despite the contentious battle for the Democratic nomination, there was a good chance that Democrats would be united in their support for the eventual nominee come November. And for at least one side of the intra-party divide, that seems to be the case. The number of Obama supporters who will vote for Hillary Clinton has remained relatively stable over the last major contests with nearly 70% pledging their support for either candidate come fall. Indiana and North Carolina, however, reveal a troubling trend for the party that the media and blogosphere has increasingly seized upon since the PA primary. In both states, though more-so in North Carolina, a minority of Clinton supporters said they would vote for Obama in a November match up against John McCain. I find credence in the position that these polls represent little more than temporary hurt feelings (if Obama fans are naïve, Clinton fans need to work through their sense of entitlement). Unfortunately, I’m also persuaded by the notion that, white Democrats, once again, are demonstrating an unwillingness to embrace any presidential candidate who might appear to serve the interests of African Americans, no matter how effectively his/her policy prescriptions will address the issues most important to middle to low income white voters. We tend to describe this voting bloc as “Reagan Democrats” who, it can be argued, rejected Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale because of the Democratic Party’s implicit ties to Civil Rights liberalism and Reagan’s effective exploitation of white resentment of welfare policies and growing fears of black inner city criminality. This strategy merged with and was eventually overtaken by Gingrich’s Contract with America which emphasized religio-cultural issues once the Clinton Administration bowed to pressure and eliminated federal welfare. Now with Obama on the ballot and the Rev. Wright media circus labeling him, at last, indisputably black, the part of the Reagan Democrat coalition animated by now four decades of held over anti-black resentment has reasserted itself.

Annoyingly, ironically, but totally unsurprisingly, it is African American voters who the media has accused of dividing the party along racial lines. Fair enough African Americans are voting for Obama by over 90% and represent a huge chunk of his support in nearly every primary election he has won. Yet white commentators, barely constrained by the shackles of political correctness and the black intelligentsia, a class always eager to tell less than successful African Americans exactly what’s wrong with them, have begun to critic African American’s unanimous support for the first African American with a serious chance to win the presidency. Noted black political scientist, Michael Dawson, for example, recently likened African American excitement over Obama to a kind of mass psychosis. However, as we know from exit polls, it is also evident that African Americans have little problem voting for Hillary Clinton. This should surprise no one. During the Lewinsky scandal, African American voters closed ranks around the Clintons. When Monica and her blue dress appeared on CNN, African Americans activated a long standing historical tradition wherein the private sexual foibles of our loved ones (Uncle Adam and his “friend” Steve) or community leaders (insert philandering black pastor joke here) are merely integrated into our overall sense of their personhood (“he/she just like that”). Bill Clinton did more than pander to African Americans, he became, for many black voters, a presidential version of the one white kid you see hanging out in otherwise majority black social spaces (something much different than the suburban white kids who wear hoodies, purchase hip hop and are frightened to go to “that” side of town). When Hillary Clinton spoke of the vast right wing conspiracy she both joined an ongoing conversation within black barbershops about the ever present and shifting “man” determined to exclude African Americans from political power in the United States and positioned herself and her husband as victims of that “man”. African Americans, in response, circled the wagons and have remained loyal to Democrats regardless of race, except in 2004 when John Kerry managed to inspire no one.

White democrats over the last thirty five years however, have rarely exhibited similar political or social flexibility when it comes to race relations. When white Democrats in industrial towns were told they needed to release their stranglehold on racially segregated neighborhoods and open access to good paying jobs they responded by voting en masse for George Wallace in the 1972 Democratic Primary and defecting to Richard Nixon’s presidential bid in November. Over the last 12 years working class white voters have been the spoiled darlings of both political parties, and they seem to know it. So used to being pandered to from the Right and the Center Right, the notion that they will not be able to reverse the will of the African American, young and liberal wings of the party has caused an emotional maelstrom that can best be described as race-pouting. While African Americans turn out in record numbers to support southern Democrats in house elections, like Travis Childers (who distanced himself from Obama) fickle, barely loyal, working class white voters threaten with increasing urgency that they will vote for McCain over Obama come November.

There’s a chance my racially colored social lens has biased my interpretation of events, but when Obama and Hillary agree on 95% of policy, how can we explain these astonishing exit poll numbers? Let’s just take crossover Republicans out of the equation at this point. We can say that age and experience drives these voters towards John McCain, except that many of them voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and Obama is running a new version of that campaign in 2008. I also think if polled, without Obama in the equation, many “experience” voters would choose less experienced candidates than Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfield for public office at overwhelming rates. We can’t say it’s “character” issues. Even in states where she emerges victorious, more voters find Barack Obama honest, more feel he shares their values and a majority claim that Rev. Wright doesn’t mean very much to them. As controls continue to eliminate other possibilities, racism gains a greater share of the explanatory force behind these exit poll numbers. A large percentage of white Democrats seem unwilling to imagine a black man in the white house.

Yet watch the media over the next few months. If Obama fails to win in November he will be blamed for not “reaching out” to white, “working” (read respectable) people. Already Clinton has linked her support among white voters with the support of the “hardworking Americans,” do non-white folks not have multiple jobs and work for non-living wages all of a sudden? The right belabors the impact of politically correct, multiculturalist rhetoric on their ability to “call it like it is” in relation to black America. Few, however, have recognized that the flip side of political correctness is our inability to call a spade a spade in the national media without upsetting the gentle sensibilities of white voters.

The "Hillary" Factor

2008-04-19T07:56:00.000-07:00

The "Hillary" Factor

Very Interesting News Post:
'

From the Politico on the coverage of Barack Obama:

My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate.

Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance?

Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining.

That’s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans — some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places — who are doing the whining.

The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama.

Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions — a mix of fair and impertinent — he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.

But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound.

The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.

Awesome Ad

2008-04-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

Awesome Ad

Did everyone see the new NC Clinton ad?

It was my favorite moment from the Texas Townhall.

Religious Perspectives on Rev. Wright

2008-04-13T13:03:00.000-07:00

Religious Perspectives on Rev. Wright

Wow, I just found these You Tube clips. I'm loving this priest who defends Rev. Wright and Rev. Farrakhan. He calls out the interviewer from Fox on his BS. My favorite line is about the black people in jail when white people are the majority of drug users.

Also great quote "Martin Luther, Jr. was not some sweet little black man with an olive branch."

Here's part II.

I'm just loving this guy.

The Messiah Machine

2008-04-11T23:44:00.000-07:00

The Messiah Machine

This blog, and many of my compatriots in the blogging business, have commented on the messianic nature of the Obamania. This fascination with the politics of character(ization) has reached its pitch in the Democratic nomination precisely because of the allegedly small distance between the policies of Senators Clinton and Obama.

In the words of the Telegraph:

The real problem with this is not the cod-religious congratulation of being the chosen ones, but a quieter, more insidious message: that the campaign itself is the change he talks about.
In this way, the Obama campaign is styling itself as a sign of change, rather than an argument for it. As he said in South Carolina: "We are showing America what change looks like." In that linguistic and conceptual manoeuvre, the goal of accomplishing the specific changes Americans urgently need - in health care, the economy, education - is relegated to the background. You're not so hungry for reform when you've already feasted at the table of self-congratulation.
While the first celebrity song had the energising feel of a rallying cry, this second video features Hollywood types Jessica Biel and Ryan Philippe anointing themselves as "the ones", encouraging their fans to join them, to become part of the "movement", to "change the world"....
While Clinton's campaign sets out her credentials and her plans for what she describes as "the most difficult job in the world", Obama's is a campaign deliberately operating on a symbolic level. Clinton is asking Americans to hire her to do a job; Obama is asking them to believe in him.
Accordingly, they offer two different models for the Presidency: put it in terms of the much discussed "day one", the Obama model is about the inauguration speech, and Clinton's is focused on the moment she gets back from the Capitol, sits down at that desk, and starts work.
This second Will.I.Am video is a perfect example of what has swept Obama to this point, but also of what has been his undoing in Texas and Ohio this week and what will be difficult for him the races to come.
For what remains to be seen is whether the American people continue to enjoy watching a bunch of celebrities congratulating themselves on being "the ones."

And I think The Telegraph is exactly right.

How Far Ahead of Clinton is Obama?, part 1

2008-04-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

How Far Ahead of Clinton is Obama? Reflections on the Delegate Math

Recently, Gov. Corzine of NJ caused a bit of a flap when he said that 'if Sen. Obama went to the convention ahead in the delegate count, the popular vote, and the states won, that I [Corzine] reserve the right to switch my vote from Clinton to Obama.'

In another future post, I will address the issue of states won and the popular vote. In this post, I want pass along some very sobering reflections about the delegate math.

Clinton not trailing Obama enough to leave race

BY JAY S. JACOBS

Jay S. Jacobs, the Nassau County Democratic chairman, is a pedged delegate for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

April 4, 2008

Calls for Sen. Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination for president are mostly based on the fact that Sen. Barack Obama is leading in the delegate count.

But Obama's estimated lead of 164 pledged delegates, when fairly analyzed, is not what it appears to be. Out of that margin, only 16 delegates were earned in primaries, while 148 delegates - fully 94 percent of his lead - were earned through caucuses.

That's an important distinction when you consider the disparity of voter representation between primary-elected and caucus-elected delegates.

First, the tallies: According to CNN, Obama has 1,413 pledged delegates and Clinton has 1,249. Breaking those numbers down, in the 28 primaries, Obama has accumulated 1,089 delegates to Clinton's 1,073. Through the 16 caucuses held to date, as well as the Texas caucus, Obama has garnered 324 delegates to Clinton's 176.

According to The New York Times, 25.3 million people have voted so far in the primaries, while only 1.1 million voters have participated in the various caucuses. Obama has captured 63 percent of caucus-goers, but only 51 percent of primary-voters. Clinton has won 36 percent of all caucus attendees and 49 percent of primary voters.

The disparity suggests that there is either something very seriously different about the voters in caucus states, or something very seriously wrong in the representation of voters' interests that comes out of the caucus process.

Caucuses, which are usually held in the evenings, are often complicated and require voters to be present for several hours, exclude many voters - like those who work at night or don't have child care options or are serving abroad in the military. What's more, caucus-goers are often required to make their choices known publicly, a practice that contradicts the American concept of the secret ballot.

And caucuses have an exaggerated impact on the delegate count. Each of the 2,162 delegates earned in the primaries to date represent an average of 11,702 voters. But in the caucuses, each of the 500 delegates represents just 2,200 voters. Each caucus vote is weighted more than 5 times what each primary vote is worth when it comes to allocating delegates.

There seems to be something very unfair about the caucus process. And, if there were any doubts about that, just look to the one state that chose delegates using both processes - on the same day: Texas.

I was an observer at one of the Texas caucuses, or "precinct conventions." While mine was relatively well-organized, many others were not. Reports of verbal and physical fights were rampant. Complaints of a lack of checks on participant qualifications were widespread. There's a reason why, a full month later, the final results have yet to be reported.

What happened in Texas is revealing. In the primary, more than 2.8 million people voted, giving Clinton 51 percent of the vote and 65 delegates. Obama received 47 percent of the vote and 61 delegates.

But the still inconclusive results from the caucuses - conducted on the very same date as the primary - yield a different result. CNN projects that Obama will earn 38 delegates from the precinct conventions, to Clinton's 29 - a margin of nine delegates from caucuses that saw a fraction of the participants in the primaries, where Clinton's margin was only four delegates. In effect, the winner of the popular vote may be the ultimate loser in Texas (sound familiar?).

But what about on Long Island? In Nassau County, 109,721 Democrats voted in the state's primary on Feb. 5. That equals 10 percent of the combined total of voters who participated in the 16 caucuses to date. Just from one county! If we add the 89,490 Democrats who voted in Suffolk, Long Island's vote was more than 18 percent of all the caucuses combined. But our 22 delegates are just 4 percent of the number of the total delegates - 500 - elected from those caucuses. Why don't Long Island's voters count as much as, say, Wyoming's?

Obama's current overall delegate lead is almost entirely based on the less-democratically run caucuses. For those that argue that superdelegates must follow "the will of the people," let's at least compare apples to apples. Give delegates chosen in caucuses the same per-vote weight as that earned by delegates in the primaries.

That democratic adjustment alone would reduce Obama's caucus delegate lead from 148 to 28, reducing his overall lead from 164 to just 44 - certainly within Clinton's reach in upcoming primaries, even without Florida and Michigan. When fairly viewed, the delegate race is far from over - and calls for Clinton to leave the race are clearly premature.

I think Jacobs is exactly correct in her reading of what the delegate lead signifies. It is a bare lead, and his supporters are trying to knuckle her out of the race.

What Clinton Supporters Need to Hear From Obama (Supporters) and the Media

2008-04-04T00:14:00.000-07:00

What Clinton Supporters Need to Hear From Obama (Supporters) and the Media

1. Who is Barack Obama?

We heard the beginnings of this in his "historic" speech on race and in his musings that he is a blank space upon which people project. But we need to know about the man's character, his tactics, and his team.

2. What has he said?

What are the speeches that Barack Obama has given? How consistent (and "new politics") is his method? Sen. Obama likes to give non-straight answers.

3. What has he done?

We need to know more about Sen. Obama's record. This is distinct from his biography. We need to know what kind of political change, in his years in elected office, he can point to as a record of what he might do as president.

4. What does he plan to do?

Besides Iraq, and now the economy, I want to hear more ab0ut Obama's comprehensive vision.

Any more major lingering questions?

Surprising Truthiness from Lou Dobbs

2008-04-03T00:16:00.001-07:00

Surprising Truthiness from Lou Dobbs

Wow, Lou Dobbs has actually decided to call the media on its bias, and speak to truth to power.

Why Are Clinton Supporters Getting Upset?

2008-04-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

Why Are Clinton Supporters Getting Upset?

There is a meme going around that a continued nomination process will further the divisions in the Democratic Party. As one Gallup Poll notes: if Hillary were the nominee, 19% of Obama supporters would vote for McCain; if Obama were the nominee, 28% of Hillary's supporters would vote for McCain.

As a side note, this is why this proposal from Gov. Mario Cuomo yesterday was so intriguing:

Who can solve the problem?
Obama and Clinton can - by putting aside personal irritations, and to some extent personal aspirations, and agreeing to end the hostilities and form a ticket that offers both of them, a candidate for president and a candidate for vice president who is clearly good enough to serve as president, should the occasion arise. That candidate for vice president would also have a good chance of being elected president eight years from now because neither of the two would be too old in 2016. If they are not capable of doing that, the two could announce they will complete the primary schedule and convention with the winner becoming candidate for president and the other agreeing to be a candidate for vice president, thereby mollifying to some extent the constituency of the candidate who was not chosen as the nominee for president.

Think of it, over the next eight years we could elect both the first woman and the first African-American to become president. That's not a dream: It's a plausible, achievable, glorious possibility - if our two remaining candidates have the personal strength and wisdom to make it happen. The joint statement announcing their agreement would rock the nation and resound across the globe - sweeter than any political poetry; smarter and more meaningful than any tightly intelligent political prose.

What a lot of people are missing is that the continued attempts to nudge Clinton out (and "get on with the nomination") and Obama's blocking of a solution to the Michigan and Florida thing are what is polarizing the voter base.

Let me be clear: trying to end the nominating process prematurely, not Clinton's continued campaigning, is what is destroying the Democratic party. The Democrats win when they let the people vote, and let every vote count. It's a simple principle.

Buck Naked Politics, I think, gets it right on this issue:

The resentment sprouted in January and has grown steadily. Weeks ago, super-blogger Taylor Marsh noticed it. In a recent message to Nancy Pelosi and Patrick Leahy (who want Obama nominated now), Marsh patiently re-stated her observations:
"If you continue to try to push Hillary Clinton out of the primary race before a clear winner emerges, you're going to accomplish one of two things....
1. Clinton supporters will harden further against voting for Obama if he becomes the nominee. (Hillary fans are already close to this, so don't push them any further, because you can't win in November without them, especially after Obama's Rev. Wright pastor disaster, which is already causing problems in the larger electorate.)....
Apparently, prominent Dems think they can knock Hillary out of the contest, and her supporters will gleefully rally round Obama.

That could happen -- if most Hillary supporters were ADD-afflicted adolescents who spend hours glued to the Cartoon network. Prominent Dems should ponder who Hillary's supporters really are...
In early February, Sen. Obama's wife told Good Morning America that she might not support Hillary if Hillary becomes the nominee. Translation: a Republican might be better.

A few weeks later, Obama supporters were outraged when Hillary acknowledged the obvious: that McCain has more experience than Obama. Most media forgot that Obama's closest surrogate had said something equally damning about Hillary.

The disparate reactions were evidence that different standards exist for Obama and Hillary.

Naturally, many Hillary supporters' resentment grew.

Next came the adolescent calls from Obama supporters (including media folks) for Hillary to drop out -- even before Ohio's primary. That started in February.

The day after Ohio's primary, Obama's campaign manager sent an email that strongly implied that Hillary should drop out.

Many Hillary-supporting Dems remember watching George Bush try to bully Al Gore into stopping the Florida recount.

Naturally, Hillary-supporting Dems had a visceral reaction to watching one of their own do that to Hillary during a close race.

Adding ipecac to the cake, Obama said a few days ago that he didn't mind if Hillary stays in the race. Why didn't he say that a month ago -- before the bullying cries reached a crescendo in the media?...
Not all marginalized Hillary supporters would vote for McCain, but many might stay home.

Amen.

2008-04-01T00:39:00.000-07:00

I just ran into the poignant post from Buck Naked Politics. I wanted to share some of it.

Do you wonder, as I do, how people got the idea that this relative newcomer to national politics has the credentials, experience, and other requisites for cleaning up after George W. Bush? Saying so is a sure recipe, as I've found, for getting called a fool, a moron, an idiot, amoral, brain-washed, a Hillary shill, a tool of the Clinton establishment, and a tool.

If I raise questions (because the questions are definitely are out there), I'm accused of 'stirring the mud' (as if you could stir mud if it the mud wasn't there in the first place) or of 'innuendo.' Obama supporters seem to think that it's unfair to bring up allegations that are out there if I can't personally prove they are true. Of course, my point isn't that they are true, but that they are out there. So far the media's given him the same sort of pass they used to give to George Bush. What happens when the honeymoon ends?

Meanwhile, not one supporter has risen to the challenge of telling me---if I'm stuck with Obama, I really need to know---what superior or equivalent credentials or experience they can cite to indicate that he is currently better qualified than Hillary to be the Chief Executive of the United States.

Most of them try to lecture me about Hillary---me!---arguing, with a sublime disregard for logic, common sense, or the facts, that her qualifications and experience aren't any greater than Obama's, or not enough greater to matter, in light of his 'charisma' and his (their faith in him ensures) pure, untarnished record.

Most say they don't care about credentials or think his credentials are sufficient. They like Obama; and that's all that matters. I like him too, or till recently I did, but they... they 'LIKE him like him', as the kids say. And if you say you don't, they're all up in your face, demanding that you step outside so they can administer a moral drubbing.

Moreover, they don't think his voting record in Illinois shows anything important about him, such as an alleged unwillingness to take a clear position on hard issues that might render him less, you know, 'electable.' (No, don't tell me your rationalizations again---I've heard them all, and remain skeptical.)

Yeah, Hillary's made mistakes. But that's because she's made hard choices.

I understand why Obama's supporters love Obama. It's the same reason Republicans used to love George W. Bush. He represents, or seems to represent, our image of what a perfect Democrat should be. They're sick of being on the defensive and of defending the Clintons. Why not vote for the candidate they really like?
Meanwhile, those of us who have supported Hillary have done so for exactly the reasons that Obama's fan base derides her. She is tough, a bit battered by hard experience, hardened to being disliked, a little soiled by her mistakes, persistent, politically astute, intellectually flexible, wary, wiley, and all the things that her critics take for insults but which are really the constituents of the ability to make realistic judgments and politic (as opposed to popular) decisions. As Obama himself put it, she's 'likable enough,' but the charm that we hear about isn't generally on display when she's campaigning, partly---of course---because any sign of her femininity draws her a whole different set of rebukes 'n ridicule.

I believe she'd make the tough calls that these dangerous times require and that she'll already recognize the 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' component of 44's job. It's going to be a long, hard slog picking up after Bush. Not much glamour or glory in it and therefore, not a job for a glamorous and glorious candidate, I'd argue. Our next candidate needs to be a determined, stoical, and experienced one who is inured to being blamed. In any case, the US presidency isn't the election for president of the senior class. It shouldn't be merely a popularity contest. Is Obama up to the job? Yes, his supporters say. They 'know' this because he has inspired them to believe it. Maybe they're right. But I remain skeptical. Of course, there is a bright side: his ascendancy is apparently pleasing to the Hillary-fearing right-wing pundits. (Obviously, it's because they too are under Obama's spell and want him to be president, am I right?) It's nice, I guess, that he has the ability to make even the right wing do the right-wing happy dance. And he made a thrill run up Chris Matthews leg (good for Tweety; I'm so pleased he's found another politiican to love). So anyway: Obama. Is he as wonderful as he seems? Perhaps. Forgive me if I don't take it on faith. For one thing, I am entirely offended that he has sat by while his campaign and his supporters use every tried and true right-wing tactic to undermine and deride Hillary----and, by extension, her supporters.

Now I'm told he's apparently "on track to make his case" that the party should 'coalesce' around his candidacy.

So now what, my fellow Dems? What are you going to do now? Because it's not just me. Hillary supporters across the country are beginning to express their outrage at the way that Hillary's been treated---not just in the media (we've come to expect this) but by other Democrats.
But then the fence on which we fence-sitters were still sitting---"after all, we've got two great candidates," we said to ourselves--- got blasted out from under us by the shocking tone of the attacks on Hillary and on those of us who supported her by the anti-Hillary contingent of our very own party.

Many Democrats will be waiting to see how the Obama camp goes about mending their fences, assuming the fences can be mended. "McCain isn't that bad, except for the war thing," mused one of my friends---previously very well-disposed toward Obama, as I and my co-bloggers used to be. "Maybe it would be better to let the Republicans clean up Bush's mess."

I realize that the 'conventional wisdom' is that we'll turn out to vote for Obama anyway. He and his campaign advisors certainly seem to assume that they'll have the support of the whole party no matter what they or their 'surrogates' do or say.

Oh, really? Here's what Ms. Obama said when she was asked on Good Morning America if she'd vote for Hillary if Hillary got the nomination.
ROBERTS: So what if Senator Clinton defeats [Obama], becoming the first woman nominee. Could you see yourself working to support the first woman nomination?

OBAMA: I'd have to think about that. I'd have to think about that, her policies, her approach, her tone. (The Huffington Post)
Good idea. I'll have to think equally hard if Obama gets the nomination. Shall I vote for McCain? Nah. But I can stay home. Or I can write in 'Hillary Clinton' or 'John Edwards.' After all, I've been pretty turned off by the 'tone' and 'approach' of the Obama campaign.

The Only Math That Counts: Election Math

2008-04-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

The Only Math That Counts: Election Math

A little while back I wrote my electoral college analysis, and suggested that Clinton would be a more competitive nominee that Obama.

Interesting enough, an article from Direct Democracy agreed with my analysis.

As Obama supporter and owner of Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, wrote regarding Michigan and Florida:

"Clinton was the only top-tier candidate to refuse the ultimate Iowa and New Hampshire pander by removing her name from the Michigan ballot. That makes her essentially the de facto winner since Edwards and Obama, caving to the cry babies in Iowa and New Hampshire, took their name off Michigan's ballot. Sure, the DNC has stripped Michigan of its delegates, but that won't last through the convention. The last thing Democrats can afford is to alienate swing states like Michigan and Florida by refusing to seat their delegates. So while Obama and Edwards kneecap their chances of winning, Clinton is single-mindedly focused on the goal."

Given that reality, the question the superdelegates need to ask themselves is, Who can win the general election? I'll make this as simple as possible: Obama cannot win.

Regardless of how well Obama did in some deep-red state Democratic caucuses, the truth is that the Wright fiasco, McCain's appeal to independents and Hispanics, the fact that nearly 1 in 3 Hillary voters may defect to McCain, and the well-oiled Republican attack machine will leave Obama, at best, where John Kerry was in August 2004, that is fighting desperately to reach 270.

Here's the best case scenario for Obama: He wins all the states John Kerry won except New Hampshire. It's McCain 290, Obama 248. [Add Michigan and New Hampshire, it's McCain 320, Obama 218.]

Here's a list of states Hillary would likely win: Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. It's Hillary 315, McCain 223. With Obama on the ticket, McCain is likely to carry most of these states. Kerry won Pennsylvania by less than 2% in 2004 and only 12 out of 67 counties. Giving Obama Iowa, it's McCain 300, Obama 238.
My hunch is that the Democratic leaders like Pelosi, Dean, and others are aware of this reality. That's why they want to shut the process down now and begin the formidable task of taking on McCain sooner rather than later. Their first task, of course, is to consolidate the base; no easy job considering many Hillary supporters think an Obama nomination illegitimate by denying her Michigan and Florida. It's also why DNC Chairman Howard Dean is saying that the most democratic process is hurting Democratic chances in the Fall.

I say on with this primary. If Obama manages to become the nominee but still wins only one or two of the remaining states, then it's going to be a problem for him. He needs to effectively woo some of the Clinton coalition to be a viable candidate, in the same way that she must woo his.

The Clinton Coalition and the Democratic Party

2008-03-31T23:42:00.000-07:00

The Clinton Coalition and the Democratic Party

Big Tent Democrat asks a question I've been thinking lately myself: Why are the Clinton-haters intent on destroying the Democratic Party?

let's assume the worst of Clinton and ignore the damage people like Josh Marshall have done and continue to do. Why don't we play that game with Clinton haters like Marshall? Do they hate Clinton so much that they will destroy the Democratic Party to make sure Clinton has no chance to win the nomination? Would they rather insure Dems lose Florida and Michigan in November instead of honoring the will of the voters in Florida and Michigan in a revote? Do they hate Clinton more than they care about the Democratic Party?

It's good that Sen. Clinton is a tough woman; few politicians have to experience this vile behavior from their so called allies. Luckily, the Obama campaign has seemed to change tracks and have laid off the calls for Sen. Clinton to withdraw.

A lot of people suggest that continue competition gives John McSame a free pass. They are wrong. As the folks over at Direct Democracy observe, if both Democrats commit to the issues, and if the Obama campaign would honor the primary results of Florida and Michigan, or schedule a revote, then it is all for the good.

As we saw yesterday with the candidates' respective speeches on the economy, this primary race does not preclude running against McCain and as we also saw yesterday, if Clinton does choose to try to win by tearing Barack Obama down instead of making her own case to voters in a constructive way, the superdelegates, which hold the key to both candidates' paths to the nomination, will turn on her. But ultimately if Democrats who are concerned that Clinton will take this all the way to the convention really want to make sure this ends before July 1, as Howard Dean has now called for, they'll urge Barack Obama to back remedies for Michigan and Florida. The idea that Barack Obama can claim a clear win without two states that early in the process would have gone handily to Senator Clinton is absurd. This IS her rationale for taking this to the convention, so anyone who would like to avoid that eventuality should get behind an alternative for those states. Gov. Richardson? Sen. Dodd? Sen. Leahy? Sen. Obama?

Why are so many people who support Obama insistent on mocking the votes of women, the white working class, and Hispanics? As Anglachel observes, Sen. Clinton has assembled one of the most diverse coalitions in Democratic history and yet is accused of racism:

[T]he current campaign reminds me of 1968 all over again, except that the targets of the high-minded ire are so unlike the caricatures being painted that I’m left going “WTF?” From Hillary herself as some kind of crypto-racist to Hispanic women Ohioans being compared to a 70’s era ethnic white male bigot, it just boggles the mind. The Stevenson contingent has no narrative, no political frame adequate to address the coalition that has formed around Hillary. They are left grasping at what this person represents to people who do not fall into the educated (male) wine-track or the uneducated (male) beer-track. On the other hand, I’m not sure anyone else has a clear concept of this new constituency either. What does it mean that an upper Midwest born, New England educated white woman who lived for several decades in Arkansas and now calls New York home is sweeping border state primaries and also cleaning up in Florida, California and Massachusetts? What part of the Democratic imagination is she setting on fire?

She is creating a new coalition of voters, more diverse than the pundits are really aware of. It is different than the powerfully Southern draw that Bill had, but, given her strength in Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, southern Ohio, roughly the Appalachian areas plus Oklahoma and Texas, there is definitely a Southern component. It is too easy to write it off as race due to the tremendous appeal that Obama has for AA voters, because it assumes only “Bunker” and “Bubba” stereotypical motivations (race hatred) for her supporters, and not that a large portion of people who would otherwise gladly be counted on her side are motivated by salutary racial pride to support another. Racism and ethnic prejudice exist in this country, but I refuse to reduce the political decisions of the majority of my fellow Democrats to destructive racist motives, whether in Hillary’s favor or in Obama’s.

I think political analyst Chuck Todd hit the right note when he wrote:

I would argue the Wright story turned off enough older white voters so that Obama can no longer argue that when compared with Clinton he will expand the electoral map in a general election with McCain.
Now he can simply say he will use a different map; a map that ultimately might expand for the party as a whole, even if his path to 270 is no less narrow a victory than Clinton's. It is just different....
Clinton should feel no hurry to get out. In fact, she is also making Obama a better candidate by forcing him to up his rhetoric on the economy and start working harder to woo these working class, white voters who appear to be eluding him in the Rust Belt states.

Why Won't Sen. Obama Count People's Votes?

2008-03-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

Why Won't Sen. Obama Count People's Votes?

It's ironic that Sen. Obama is hailed as the choice of the people. While I admit that he has generated significant pop appeal, it is undeniable that almost all of his delegate lead has come from low-vote scenarios and suppression of the vote.

As three poignant examples:

(a) Sen. Obama won both the Washington caucus and the Washington primary. The cacaus he won by 20 points, but the primary, only five points, with many regions of the state going pro-Clinton. His delegate advantage here is over-pronounced.

(b) Sen. Clinton won the Texas primary vote, and Sen. Obama won the Texas caucus vote. Her margin of victory, about a 100, 000 or so in the primary, netted her fewer delegates than his margin of victory, 20, 000 or so. To further inflame matters, the Wyoming caucus gave Obama a 2,066-vote margin, but a big enough delegate boost to virtually cancel out Hillary Clinton's 329,000-vote margin in the five March races.

(c) Sen. Obama has been opposed to any solution that allows the populations of Florida and Michigan to allocate their delegates. His campaign has stuck to an even split of all the delegates as the only solution it will accept. But why not allow a popular vote, which could, in fact, go either way, determine the distribution of delegates?

Michigan and Florida, of course, are sore spots in relations between Obama and Clinton supporters. Obamanians see Clinton as an opportunist and a cheater, breaking the rules to win. I am continually puzzled by this rationale as neither candidate was to blame for the change in primary date, and, faithful to the pledge, neither candidate actively campaigned there. (Sen. Obama did run TV ads for about a week in the state of Florida, and actively used his surrogates to get people to vote uncommitted in Michigan.)

More importantly, I am shocked the DNC punished Florida and Michigan for something the party Republicans did to the state Democrats. (These Republican attempts to rig the Democratic primary contests should not be surprising given that we know (a) Rove and his friends have been interfering to bury Clinton in the primary to face a weaker opponent, (b) the RNC developed 'Republicans for Obama' outlets to push him over the top in a number of open primaries, and (c) if the Republicans could exploit Democratic anger in two key swing states (particularly ones that were to favor Clinton) they could accomplish (a) and (b).

If I am correct, my argument raised a number of key implication. (1) Why should Sen. Clinton be punished for a successful Republican stratagem? (2) Why is Obama using low turnout victories to overcome Clinton's popular vote advantage and to deny Clinton the delegates? (3) Why aren't more people pushing for a solution to Michigan and Florida?

Wayne Barrett of the HuffPo elaborates on the Republican maneuvers in Michigan and Florida:

The body count that the mainstream media has regurgitated out of Florida and Michigan is that 2.3 million Democrats voted in primaries that broke the rules, leaving the DNC with no choice but to level both villages, even if the collateral damage might include the party's prospects of carrying those disenfranchised states in November. The DNC and the MSM appear to have simultaneously concluded that even Clinton's 300,000-vote win in Florida, where both candidates competed on a level playing field, shouldn't be counted in the popular vote tally, a calculation that appears nowhere in DNC rules and turns 1.7 million Democratic voters into ghosts.

The irony is that the drumbeat for Clinton's withdrawal -- coming on the heels of her recent wins and right before what may be her biggest in Pennsylvania -- is rooted in the collapse of the effort to redo Michigan and Florida. The theory is that she should quit because there is no way she can win, and that there is no way she can win because two states she could win, at least one of which she actually did win, will not be counted until she gets out. Barack Obama would thus become the nominee -- not because of an honestly earned if precariously narrow lead in the final national vote, but because of two elections he would not let happen....
The Republican role is not some irrelevant anecdote. The DNC is charged, under its rules, to determine whether the Democrats in a noncompliant state made a "good faith" effort to abide by the party's electoral calendar, and to impose the full weight of its available penalties, namely a 100 percent takedown of a state's delegation, only if Democratic leaders in that state misbehaved. So the fact that it was Republicans who fomented the move-up of primaries in both these states to dates out-of-line with the DNC calendar is at the heart of the matter.

The rules also demand that the DNC's 30-member Rules and Bylaws Committee conduct "an investigation, including hearings if necessary" into these matters. The purpose of such a probe is to figure out if Democratic leaders in a state that did move up "took all provable, positive steps and acted in good faith" to either "achieve legislative changes" to bring a state into compliance or to "prevent legislative changes" that took a state out of compliance. A DNC spokesman could not point to any real "investigation" the party conducted of the actions of "relevant Democratic party leaders or elected officials," as the rules put it. All that happened with Florida, for example, was that two representatives of the state party made a pitch for leniency immediately before the Rules Committee voted for sanctions....

If that sounds like a curious way to end a nominating contest that 30 million to 33 million voters will participate in before it's done, even stranger is that the DNC is following only some of its rules -- and that the real culprits who caused this debacle are Republicans, who are now relishing the catfight they provoked.
What [an investigatory] probe might have discovered was a [Republican] rationale for doing, at worst, what the RNC did to its own overeager primary schedulers in the same two states -- cutting the delegations by half. That's precisely the penalty specified in DNC rules, but the committee, exercising powers it certainly had the legal discretion to exercise, upped the ante as far as it could. In a bizarre reversal of public policy, the RNC, surely aware that the principal miscreants in both states were Republicans, applied a sane yet severe sanction. The Democrats opted for decapitation.

The presumption of much of the national coverage about Michigan, to start with, has been that the Dems did this one to themselves -- a presumption based, in large part, on Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm's endorsement of a January 15 vote, a date far ahead of the anticipated February 9 primary. All Clinton-backer Granholm did, however, was a sign a bill. The bill originated in a Republican-controlled Senate and passed by a 21-to-17 straight party-line vote -- with every Democrat casting a no vote.

Florida's Republican governor, Charlie Crist, is, like Granholm, seen as a prime player behind the state's acceleration of the primary calendar. But Crist isn't half the Florida story; Marco Rubio, a Jeb Bush protégé who runs the nearly 2-to-1 Republican Florida House, drove that bill through the legislature like it was a tax cut limited by law to top GOP donors.

Indeed, the tracks under this train wreck trace back, in each case, to Republican maneuvers in state legislatures, political no- man's-lands for all who've blithely dismissed the disenfranchisement of the millions of registered Florida and Michigan Democrats.

Barrett then goes on the specifics of each case.

For Michigan, he writes:

Let's start with Michigan, whose Democratic chair Mark Brewer is a member of the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the national party and in that capacity voted to sanction Florida -- a pretty good indication that he wasn't a great champion of challenging the DNC calendar in his own state. Brewer in fact declared the Republican-sponsored move-up bill unacceptable from the start.

When it weaved its way through the divided Michigan legislature last August, only 29 of the state's 75 Democratic legislators (in the House and Senate) supported it. A week after the bill cleared the Senate over unified Democratic objections, these 29 Democrats in the House voted for it, precisely the same number that voted against it or abstained (22 and seven). It was 38 Republican yes votes in the House that made it law. While Democrats like the governor, U.S. Senator Carl Levin, and DNC committeewoman Debbie Dingell favored moving the primary date up, it was a Republican state senator, Cameron Brown, who proposed the January 15 date. Levin and Dingell only supported that date when they concluded that the DNC was allowing other states, like New Hampshire, to defy the party's prescribed schedule while threatening Michigan with sanctions if it shifted its date.

And Levin and Dingell certainly weren't calling the shots for the Democrats in the legislature. Andy Dillon, the Democratic House speaker who'd voted for the move-up initially, walked away from the early primary in November, almost a month before the DNC voted to strip the state of its delegation. When two court rulings found the move-up bill unconstitutional for technical reasons, giving Democratic state legislators who initially voted for it a chance to reconsider, they took it. Dillon and his House Democrats refused to support a bill that would've protected the January 15 date from threatened judicial cancellation by correcting the technical deficiency. The Senate, again voting along party lines, quickly adjusted the bill to the court decisions, but Dillon refused to allow a vote in the House. All of this suggests a "good faith" effort to block an early primary -- as required by DNC rules.

Had not the state's highest court overturned the earlier decisions by a 4-to-3 vote just days before absentee ballots had to be mailed out, the early primary would not have been held. Significantly, all four of the judges who voted to allow the election were Republicans, and two of the judges who voted against it were Democrats.

In fact, it was a Democratic political consultant who brought the lawsuit that almost killed the primary. While the Republican state party filed an amicus brief in support of the bill, the Democrats took a barrage of editorial potshots in the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, the Flint Journal, and other papers for refusing to stand up for the state's interest. Salivating over all the attention and revenue that would come with an early primary, the papers accused Democrats of "withering," "carrying water for presidential candidates," and "blocking a bill to rescue the election." State GOP chair Saul Anuzis declared: "The Michigan Democrats and the House Democrats in particular appear willing to blow up the primary for petty, political, selfish, self-preservationist motives, to protect their hides."

Even before the court rulings, 19 Democrats in the House co-sponsored an October bill to repeal the one that authorized the election, including eight members who'd initially voted for the January 15 date. That bill was doomed from the outset since the Senate would never agree, but it was a measure of how fiercely Democrats had come to oppose the early primary. The ultimate result in Michigan, with a triumphant Clinton the only major candidate on the ballot, is, without a doubt, a Republican result.

Florida's story is more tragic.

The Republicans don't just control both houses of the Florida legislature. Their combined 103-to-57 majority allowed them to dictate the terms of the bill that moved the primary to January 29. It is true that all but one of the state's Democratic legislators supported the bill. But a closer look reveals that vote to be more an indication of a realistic and productive compromise with the ruling Republicans than any intent to breach Democratic rules.

Florida's leading news outlets, just like Michigan's, converted an early primary into a matter of state patriotism, and that point of view, coupled with the mathematical inability to even slow the Republican push, forced Democrats to roll over.

Another factor attracting Democratic votes in the legislature for the bill was one the DNC should certainly appreciate. Governor Crist threw a reform long sought by Florida Democrats into the bill: a mandatory paper trail for all votes cast in future elections. "The Democrats have been fighting for a paper trail bill since 2000," said State Senator Nan Rich, "and Governor Bush never would support it. So finally we got a governor who was willing to support it and it ended up connected to the early primary bill. That was unfortunate. If the paper trail hadn't been there, I believe we Democrats would've all voted no. Still, if all the Republicans had voted one way and all the Democrats had voted another way, the bill would've passed." (This Christmas tree bill -- whose title alone was 154 lines long -- had something special for everyone. It would even enable Crist to run as John McCain's vice presidential candidate, revoking a ban against state officials running for federal office.)

But "the driving force behind the move," as the Tampa Tribune put it, was 36-year-old House speaker Marco Rubio, who announced that pushing the primary up was a top goal before he took over the House at the start of 2006. Branded a "Jeb acolyte" by the Florida press, Rubio, a Cuban from West Miami married to a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, was given a gold samurai sword by Bush in a passing-of-the-conservative-mantle gesture in 2005. Rubio is a member of a wired Florida law firm whose chairman is so close to Bush that he rushed down to the county jail when the governor's daughter Noelle was arrested on a drug-related charge. When Rubio's term as speaker ends later this year, he is slated to go to work for a think tank headed by a Jeb Bush business associate. The primary bill originated with Rubio and ultimately passed the House unanimously -- but only after Democrats made what they knew would be a losing effort to alter it.

Martin Kiar and Mary Brandenburg, House Democrats who were cosponsors of the bill, tried to amend it. "We offered an amendment on the floor shifting the date to one within the Democratic party rules," said Brandenburg. "The Democrats all voted for it, and Republicans all voted against it." Actually, the Kiar/Brandenburg proposal did not completely comply with DNC directives, but it was a signal of the concerns Florida Dems had about the move-up legislation. Said Kiar: "No matter what, whether we supported it or cosponsored it, the Republican majority was going to push it through."

When the DNC sanctioned Florida, it critiqued the efforts of the Democratic leaders in both houses, suggesting that they'd merely gone through the motions of feigned opposition. But the House cosponsor of the bill, David Rivera, literally laughed on the floor at the Democratic amendment, according to the House Democrats. Going through the motions was all the outgunned Democrats could do. A DNC critic of Florida Democrats was reduced in a recent New York Times op-ed to citing remarks supporting the early primary made by state leaders after it was a fait accompli, likely because she couldn't make a case about their conduct before the Republican legislature set the date.

If you think that this whole DNC process has been unfair, sign the petition.

The Hillary Bloggers

2008-03-27T23:53:00.000-07:00

The Hillary Bloggers

A few weeks back, due to the increasingly partisan and demeaning nature of the net roots conversation, a group of pro-Clinton or even-handed bloggers staged a writer's strike/boycott.

I wanted to recognize these differing viewpoints on my blog, for regular visitors who are looking for other sources of news. These blogs have been my solace as MSNBC goes off the deep end in its reiteration of the pro-Obama talking points. Often, I would even know that Clinton was doing anything positive until I read it on the Internet. If I had only listened to the news television, I would be under the impression that the only thing the Clinton campaign had done since Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island was (a) lose Mississippi and Wyoming, (b) smear Obama as a Muslim, (c) lie about her Bosnia experience, (d) get condemned for breaking apart the party by Gov. Richardson, and (e) fan flames of race-hatred on the Wright-controversy and former Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro.

[In fact, Sen. Clinton has been (a) campaigning in Indiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, (b) giving major speeches on the economy and the Iraq war during the whole Wright episode, (c) releasing key documents from her White House years, (d) giving a lot of press interviews to local and national presses, (e) being endorsed by elected, formerly elected, and party Democrats in West Virginia, California, Pensyvlania as well as by the Liberty City Democrats (a GLTBQ organization in PA), Rep. Murtha, and Sen. Evan Bayh (he was an early supporter), (f) defending Florida and Michigan, (h) superior foreign policy credentials defended by Ambassador Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, and (i) attending crucial and under appreciated women's events.]

This unbalanced coverage of Sen. Clinton must come to end, and Democrats have to save the Democratic Party from the DNC. Please sign this petition to seat Michigan and Florida's delegates (remember we need to run a 50-state strategy against Sen. John McSame) and please donate 10.44 to the Clinton campaign to get her message out there about the positive benefits of the Democratic Party's platform for American voters in the fall.

Here are my esteemed list of the bloggers holding down the fort of fair or Pro-Clinton news coverage.

Taylor Marsh, a journalist and insightful American politics watcher from Missouri, a bellweather state. She re-informed me with her sometimes unconventional, but never uninformed writings. More importantly, she's often ahead of the curve.

Tom Watson, who, in his own words, offers " an iconoclastic view, my own perception of reality. No one pays me to write it, and all editorial judgments are mine. You don't have to agree; indeed, agreement here is kind of rare. But let's try to argue about it with civility."

Sugar-N-Spice, one of my favorite bloggers, is a black female supporter of Sen. Clinton, who wondered why so many people drank the kool aid of Sen. Obama. Her background gives her license to say a lot of things that other people can't say, but are thinking, about the Obama candidacy.

The River Daughters are truly inspiration people who intertwine their analysis and insights with personal anecdotes from their lives. I started volunteering my time because of them. They call people out and I love them for it.

Another very informative blog, No Quarter, tries to ferret out false-hoods and replace lies with truth. Live on, Larry Johnson, live on.

Talk Left, one of the few blogs to call out the United States as the prison society that it is, is also broadly sympathetic to, but critical of, Sen. Clinton. True leftists who rigourously theorize the present for the purposes of furthering a progressive agenda. (I wonder if they ever supporter Edwards?) Always, always informative offering detailed arguments and empirical proof.

Tennessee Guerrilla Women offer an awesome blog that deprograms rightist ideologies. They have taken Sen. Obama to task for his mad and unethical pursuit of the Democratic nomination.

MyDD, another progressive community, is also unabashedly leftist. They too wonder often why the mainstream media is so easily bamboozled by young charismatic men.

Jon Swift is a conservative who calls 'em like he see 'em. That's not always in Sen. Clinton's favor, but unlike most news sources, he hasn't gone out of his way to bash her either.

The Left Coaster is a decidedly anti-elitist blogging community that prides itself on thumbing its nose as the mainstream and Beltway political communities.

Buck Naked Politics lives up to its name of strips off the gloss of spin on the news provided a deeply convinced leftist view of the world.

Anglachel I justed started reading. It's very fascinating.

And, Salon, as a replacement for Slate. Slate, who, since Iowa, have all but crowned Barack Obama, should also be boycotted. (Especially those earnest bloggers on XX Factor.)

The Democratic Primary, a Clinton Nomination, and A Growing Rift in the Party

2008-03-27T23:10:00.001-07:00

The Democratic Primary, a Clinton Nomination, and A Growing Rift in the Party

I should have known in 2007 when Sen. Obama (ironically) uttered: "I'm confident that I can get Sen. Clinton's votes if I win the nomination, but I'm not confident that she can get mine" would be prophetic about the way he would run his campaign. Trying to discredit Clinton at every turn--even going so far as a week before the Texas-Ohio-Rhode Island-Vermont vote to look petulantly at a new camera and say when she loses either Texas or Ohio, we should really consider moving forward with this nomination, Sen. Obama's campaign has degenerated for character attacks to character assassination.

I've really become weary of Sen. Obama's presumptiveness, and his continued "clarifications" of his statements. The Obama candidacy is based on two main arguments (1) a new brand of politics, and (2) opposition to both the Iraq war and the thinking that got us into the war.

Since Super Tuesday I, it has become exceedingly clear that neither are true. Obama is not practicing new politics-- in fact, his campaign has been running an aggressively negative campaign against Sen. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton, stooping so low as to attack her even his campaign emails--and is mired in his continued misstatements on core Democratic issues like universal health care, withdrawing from the Iraq war, or rethinking NAFTA while maintain free trade. As more time has passed, the media has slowly reported that Obama has been a poor national and state senator--often skipping key meetings, votes, and not exercising his basic legislative duties. More importantly, many of his key ideas were lifted from other politicians, reducing "change you can believe in" to "change we can xerox" and "change we can talk about."

Second, if Sen. Obama is the anti-war candidate, why have key members of the Out-of-Iraq caucus--that is, those members of the House of Representatives who have opposed this war consistently with their votes and voices since they were elected--endorsed and defended Sen. Clinton? They are joined by five former general and flag officers at the rank of four stars, including two former chairmen and one vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Apparently, these people are not getting the message that the race is over and the only Obama can truly bring peace.

I want to quote some of Rep. Murtha's endorsement because many are refusing to see this: "Senator Clinton is the candidate that will forge a consensus on health care, education, the economy, and the war in Iraq...Her experience and careful consideration of these issues convinced me that she is best qualified to lead our nation and to bring credibility back to the White House." I want to note that Sen. Murtha, who announced just days for Gov. Richardson, had weeks early pledged to remain neutral.

I mention all this because it has become that Sen. Clinton should be pushed aside. Characterizing her as a Tanya Harding, Americans are subjected to endless declarations about "the math" as the media continues to stump for Obama. As a black (male) independent who supports Clinton, and as a voter who doesn't want another Republican administration, I wanted to echo some thoughts of the others out there who are getting it right.

This is from Anglachel:

My post yesterday called out the degree of violence, particularly misogynistic violence, present in the current Democratic contest. However, the characterization of Democrats who would not support the Democratic nominee in the general as "infantile" has stuck with me. I'm dropping the snark for a post and really looking at what blind spots are demonstrated through this stance. My point is not to criticize a particular blogger (richly though he may deserve it), but to get into the center of some profound self-deceptions going on with people all over the Left over the nature of political legitimacy.

Declaring people unwilling to support the nominee "infantile" is a very poor way of looking at the emerging dynamic of the race, though it would have been an appropriate chastisement prior to any of the caucuses or primaries. At that time, both Edwards and Obama publically refused to commit to supporting Hillary (which equates to telling their supporters not to vote for her) should she be the nominee. That was the point at which a slap should have been administered and not to HRC. I do not remember the Blogger Boyz complaining about this language when it was assumed the person being penalized by such threats was Hillary.

The fundamental problem with categorically labeling Hillary voters as infantile is that it takes as true the elite pundit meme that she and her supporters are illegitimate participants in the process, the equivalent of Ralph Nader and his adherents. This initial error is further compounded by assuming that those who will refuse to vote for Obama are simply a small group of delusional HRC supporters, though the vehemence with which the prospect of voter defections is being met belies that public stance. There are two increasingly overlapping groups of voters who are likely to defect from the Democratic column in November, and they illustrate two ways in which Obama has lost political legitimacy.

Taking up the first issue, the presumption of the punditocracy that we all know that a Hillary victory cannot be for real, has ironically enough become the foundation of Obama’s lack of legitimacy, but has expanded to include the Democratic Party itself. This crisis brewed for some time, but took form when HRC was not permitted a level playing field in the campaign. The refusal to grant her equal footing may have begun with the MSM, which has always hated her, but they were soon joined by progressive blogs and the other campaigns, producing a phalanx of elite opinion trying to delegitimize her at every step. The signature moment was the Drexel debate where Obama and Edwards took up Russert’s invitation to batter her in front of the cameras and then played the victims afterwards by claiming that Hillary was playing a “gender card”.

To those several million people who support Hillary or who at least regarded her favorably, this pointed attack upon her as a person as well as a candidate, coupled with the relatively gentle treatment granted the other candidates, had the effect of solidifying a great deal of our support. To declare her unworthy of participating, a monster who would “do anything to win,” was seen for what it was, straightforward demonization of a perfectly acceptable candidate, one with a deep well of support and an enviable record of public service. We simply don’t accept the elite framing of our candidate.

When A-list bloggers begin to lecture HRC supporters about having to grow up and not be infantile, they just dig themselves into a deeper hole, because they trivialize and mock our considered support for her. The arguments they offer up about her – duplicitous, hateful, cold, power-mad, disliked, criminal – are straight out of the Rightwing sewer, do little save undermine the validity of their own stances.

Then, there was the comment from Obama that he knew all the Hillary supporters would vote for him, but he didn’t think she could get his. What incredible offensiveness, to claim that he could take my vote for granted. It dismissed the fact that, were he to become the nominee, he would then have to ask for the support of those who had not selected him the first time around, and thus put in a position of providing reasons to vote for him to the people he casually dismissed.

Thus, among HRC supporters, the effect of this particular campaign has been to erode the legitimacy not of our candidate but of Obama. As polling shows, his presumption that he automatically inherited her supporters has been proved untrue, in great part because he assumed that no one could really support that “monster”.

The second issue, which is interwoven with the first and is, in my opinion, a far greater problem for the party as such, has to do with the treatment of rank and file Democrats who vote for Hillary. As shown in exit polls, these voters are the bulk of the Democrats who voted (as opposed to all who participate), people for whom being a Democrat is a part of their personal as well as political identity. Falling support for Obama among this group is a more recent phenomenon, one that he might have been reversing in mid-February but which is trending down with every poll. There is some anger here over the treatment of Hillary, but even more it is rejection of Obama himself as a candidate due to his own actions and statements. At a slightly deeper level, it is an upsurge of the latent resentment and distrust between the so-called “tracks” in the party – beer and wine – the shorthand way of identifying the significant social and economic and increasingly gender stratification of the Democratic Party.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post (can’t remember which one), the sour note that Obama has struck with this constituency is the sore spot of anti-Americanism, the constant attack point of Republicans on the Democrats, and the way in which Obama simply is not able to credibly counter that threat. It is also the case after the Wright disaster that these Democrats don’t believe that Obama is patriotic enough. It wasn’t Wright’s racism but his cursing of the nation that has gone down sideways. On top of this is the perception that he does not care much for “the little guy” (the NAFTA waffling, the lack of serious legislative achievements), and the foundation for his own legitimacy becomes narrow and unstable.

There is a deep irony here. In Obama’s set piece speeches he excels at tapping into the leftwing version of the patriotic narrative, about equality, justice and opportunity. This was the power of his keynote speech in 2004. But the promise of that speech has not been present in the candidate. The spousal unit sums it up in a single sentence – he ran too soon. He did not give himself the time to distance himself from the Chicago mess (political, financial, religious) and put some substantive national level public service under his belt. In some ways, the Chicago power base has insulated Obama from the conundrums of running a Democratic campaign in a centrist nation.

This is a lesson both Bill and Hillary Clinton have learned. Big Dog got his ass handed to him his first reelection bid in Arkansas because he came across as too elite and alien to the population, too eager to push his agenda and not inclined to listen to what people told him. In a word, arrogance. You don’t run as a member of the liberal elite in middle America. You cannot be perceived as having contempt for the people whose votes you need. Hillary faced this in upstate New York, plus even more baggage – carpetbagger, outsider, Billary monster, favorite punching bag of the right – and some real Republican opponents. She did it the hard way, by demonstrating her work for the voters of the state, won the first election, then busted her chops for her constituents, and had a blow-out reelection. She certainly has legitimacy in New York.

Back to the race. The rank and file Democrats who have favorable attitudes towards the Clintons and also for McCain look at Obama and see someone running a negative campaign and who appears to disdain the nation. The mix of pocketbook issues with a straightforward and direct love of country is not favoring him with these voters. The more they hear, the less they are inclined to support.

Then we get into the recent events of the campaign. Florida and Michigan are the contests where actual legitimacy for the candidates and thus the eventual nominee will be founded. A 48 state strategy is not viable if those two are not part of the 48. In these places, Hillary voters are being written off, dismissed as illegitimate voices in the process. The insistence on only one aspect of the rules, the penalty, while ignoring the full set of rules that could be used to manage the situation is eroding Obama’s claims to legitimacy because people don’t care about arcane party rules. They want their votes to count. The acts by Obama to prevent a revote have done nothing to increase his standing with ordinary voters, let alone strong Clinton partisans. This does not make him attractive to people who will have to switch their allegiance should Hillary not be the nominee. Conversely, her insistence on having votes counted will earn her greater legitimacy as well as benefit her with extra delegates.

In Ohio and Texas, the lack of respect for the opposition combined with a lack of legislative track record has cost Obama the victories he needed to shore up his legitimacy as a credible general election candidate and to counterbalance the problems raised by not counting Florida and Michigan. The sneer about Ohio voters who failed to vote for him as “Archie Bunkers” was a slur that every solid Democrat understands. He was calling those voters stupid racist bigots. Then we got the Wright controversy, which has simply added more fuel to the perception of Obama as an elitist liberal who does not honor his country or respect his countrymen.

Obama has rudely lost the good regard of Democrats like me. The hysteria and hate of the elite punditocracy who have declared me and my candidate to be illegitimate in an attempt to bully her supporters, while giving him a free ride, cannot be rewarded. The Democratic Party is choosing to declare Hillary voters to be expendable (can’t count your vote if it would change the outcome of the race) and of lesser worth than Obama supporters. And all of this is being viewed with increasing disgust by a growing number of Democratic voters.

The candidate with the legitimacy problem in this campaign is Obama, not Hillary.

I lastly wanted to provide another thought provoking quote from another blog that calls 'em like she sees 'em. We've heard from Sen. Kerry about how we should support Obama because he is black, from Andrew Sullivan about his face, and from others how Obama proves that the American dream is real. What we haven't heard about as much is how deeply transformative of gendered power relations--and entrenched misogyny in the mainstream media--a Clinton presidency will be.

One of the other great tragedies of this primary election season is the setting aside of what a Hillary Clinton nomination would mean for the little girls--black, white, hispanic, asian and everything in between, in this country and the world. I'm constantly bombarded with the, "think of what this would mean for little black boys" pleas from my fellow African-Americans, but I always walk away thinking to myself, "but, what about little girls?"
Women have been carrying the weight of this world on their shoulders from sea to shining sea, from one side of the globe to another and yet, so often we are raised believing that there will always be a limit to what we can achieve. An Obama win would be historic and it would indeed mean something to little black boys and little black girls, but a Hillary win would mean something to little black girls and little white girls and little hispanic girls and little asian girls. It would mean that the women in Sudan may turn their hearts towards a new hope on the world stage. A hope that maybe finally, with a woman in charge of one of the most powerful nations in the world, things might get better. It would mean that women in India, where two in three married women is the victim of domestic violence, might finally have the courage and receive the resources they need to leave those horrific conditions.

So many women all over the world are watching the United States to see how we treat the first truly viable female presidential candidate. Whether we want to acknowledge or not, little girls right here in this country are watching too. They hear the conversations where Hillary is called a bitch and God knows everything in between as she speaks on television. What do those little girls see her doing, that warrants her being called a bitch? Simply making an attempt at greatness. What will make them yearn to make the attempt when their time comes after watching the way this woman has been vilified? As I write this, the song, "Little Girl" by the singing duo, Mary Mary, comes to mind and it explains so very plainly why little girls need not be forgotten in this primary season any longer. Check out the very touching video that a user at YouTube put together using the song below.
We've got a lot of work left to do and Hillary will need a lot of money to be a real contender in the next several contests. Even a donation of $10.44 (the 44 is for her presidency!) helps her efforts. Click here to make a donation and then send Hillary a message of support. So much is riding on this election.

I've had enough of the disrespecting of this woman who has worked hard to ensure that many people have the chance to achieve their God-given potential.

2008-03-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

A More Perfect Election: How Obama’s Speech Won the Nomination and possibly the Presidency in a Single Stroke.

No doubt those who believe that today’s polls are 100% predictive of primary elections weeks and months in the future believe that either Obama has forever lost his bid to win the nomination and certainly eliminated himself from contention in a general election battle with John McCain. Some might even say that if poll numbers do not significantly change in the next few days, Obama’s speech failed in its mission to reassure voters who are upset about his long term association with Rev. Wright. More on why that’s a misguided line of thinking below, first there is some structure and existing fact to contend with.

Unless the “comeback kids” can pull a legendary political maneuver there will be no “
redo” in either Michigan or Florida. This, as the punditry has pointed out, is devastating for Clinton’s ability to appeal to super delegates. Even if the DNC accept Florida delegation as is, Obama would still lead Clinton by 400,000 in the popular vote and almost everyone agrees, with the exception of Pennsylvania, Obama will win or be close in all 12 of the remaining Democratic primaries/caucuses. There’s a ton of evidence that indicates neither Hillary’s “big states matter in the fall” message nor her pleas for “voter’s rights” are achieving any traction in the media or among the American people. And thank goodness for that, because those positions make no sense. Hillary’s win in large primary states were not so substantial that they suggested Ohioans or Californians would not vote for the Democratic nominee in fall. Exit polls (at the time) indicate that most voters would be more than happy with either candidates and, as has been mentioned on this blog, the two candidates are as one in terms of policy. It must be added that the symmetry between their policy decisions does not reflect Obama’s ability to “xerox” policy proposals from Clinton; it reflects both candidates knowledge of Democratic political history as both policies fall in line with the policy traditions that worked for F.D.R’s New Deal but did not work for Johnson’s Great Society.

With that said, unless Clinton wants to join the anti-Rev Wright bandwagon and use that as a justification for superdelegate’s overriding the popular vote and pledged delegate count, there’s little more she can do at this point to make a case that she’s a more viable candidate than Obama. And unfortunately for Clinton, the last week has eliminated a series of her principal critics against Obama: That he has not been challenged, we don’t know who he is, that the media has treated him with soft gloves and that he has not proven he can be a fighter. Check, check, check and double check. The orgy of sensationalism and irresponsible media coverage of the Rev. Wright scandal has had an effect on how Americans see Obama. For some, this was there first close look at a candidate and in a society where African Americans are judged collectively to a degree incomparable with white Americans, that first glance could not have been a pretty one.

Thankfully, A More Perfect Union was not only the perfect response by Obama to this growing scandal it also offered the American people a true choice about their political system, about how leaders and leadership is evaluated and what issues “matter” in an election cycle. First and most importantly, is Obama’s decision to not “disavow” or “completely renounce in every way, Rev. Wright.” Political strategists around the world must have watched Obama through trembling fingers as he said the following:

Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

The risk and reward here is in Obama’s willingness to use Wright to throw a mirror at the American people, linking his religious and emotional experience to a politic that so often imagines itself as in a different social and cultural world than their political candidates. This isn’t the fault of American citizens. The allures of power and prestige often pull people from the population who do imagine themselves as above or greater than everyday American citizens. Politicians replicate this skewed view by actively participating in political campaigning that test’s a campaigns ability to manage image rather than manage policy options and make a case to the American people. The ever escalating costs of the election cycle substantially limit who can afford to run, not just in terms of funds, but in time off from work and home life. Yet, Obama has attempted to cut through that, asking people to be self reflexive and ask themselves how they react when they hear a controversial or fiery message from a religious leader in their community with which they do not agree. I believe, in the long term such a strategy can be effective for a few reasons. First, there’s a segment of the electorate who is hungry for people who are “real” who will speak honestly and plainly about their own faults and the faults of those around them, this message is hugely appealing to them. Second, there’s a segment of the electorate who is religious and heard these kinds of messages and had that cringe moment and who stayed in their church. Here Obama is specifically appealing to younger voters.

Obama shines the social mirror on the public even brighter in the following section.

The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.”

There’s much more here than asking people to “forgive” or “understand” Wright. He’s inviting people to think about their own journeys of self discovery and their own development of political ideology. Like many people in their twenties when Obama met Wright he had to be impressed by his ability to create a huge religious, community service organization despite meager beginnings and a life history where he experienced intense levels of overt and institutional racism. No doubt over the course of his time at Trinity Obama began to evolve beyond certain aspects of the Reverend’s ideology, particularly the parts rooted in a logic that understands America as, in Obama’s words, “static.” Young voters going through similar periods of self discovery will strongly relate. Generation X will perhaps relate even more as they realize how far they have come from their ways of thinking and believing since their twenties.

There are of course, huge risks, with this strategy. Many Americans, particularly when it comes to race but it extends to foreign policy and the defense of class difference, are defensive as all get out when it comes to these issues. The audacity of being associated with Rev. Wright could dig Obama a deeper hole with people who wanted to see contrition, remorse and “disowning.” And while I agree with Roland Martin’s brilliant observation that nothing about these calls for “disownment” are in synch with a Christian philosophy of love and forgiveness, it’s not even about that. If individuals are unable to emotionally relate to the numerous semi-biographical/historical narratives about himself, Wright and the politics of race in America then they made their minds up before he spoke and would, very likely, not vote for any African American President for office. Unless you have cut yourself off completely from the African American community you can not totally divorce yourself from this brand of Black ideology and you can not win the Black vote as a Black candidate.

Brilliantly, Obama called this segment of the population out towards the end of his speech, declaring that Americans are free to treat this campaign as a one issue referendum on race, if they so choose. I fully expect him to treat the issue with increasing insignificance over the coming months. Ideally, if questioned on the matter he will take a truly Presidential tone and declare that he has spoken on the issue, the video exists, the transcript is out there and if voters have continued questions once viewing the speech that there’s not much he can do. Between now and November, Wright will remain part of the public discourse, he must. As Obama pointed out, race can not be ignored, it’s too endemic to our culture. But what will happen is some Americans will look at the economy, the war and healthcare and say “I care about these issues more than I care about Rev. Wright.” It is, in every way, the ultimate test of voter’s ability to truly stomach a Black President. Not the most Anglophiled person with Black or brown skin who parrots negative stereotypes about African Americans back to white audiences(J.W. Watts, Clarence T. etc) to demonstrate their subservience to conservative white perspective on the world. But an African American person whose love for their country is unwavering and intermixed with a knowledge of the nation’s racial faults and faultlines. I don’t know what will happen, but I think it can not be argued that Obama failed to lay down the gauntlet, or to stand up for himself or to declare to the American people “this is who I am, either vote or not.”

The Strategic Politics of Negative Campaigning

2008-03-18T12:58:00.001-07:00

The Strategic Politics of Negative Campaigning

Clearly, I am going to have to say something about Sen. Obama's "major speech" on race today. As a black independent who is supporting Sen. Clinton, but also recognizes the important of a black presidential nominee, I'm sure I'll have something to say a little later. I think it's important to think about the way in which racial politics and discourses frame how people understand disparity, agency, and identity in modern America.

My initial reaction is that Obama has correctly used his speech-making gifts to try and tone down the race-related rhetoric, and, if reports are to be believed, will join the move Sen. Clinton made yesterday in talking about the other issues in the campaign (Iraq, the economy, etc) in an effort to change the subject. What the speech does not accomplish, laudable though it is, is the fact that Sen. Obama, who based his campaign on "superior judgment" as a substitute if not superior trade for 'experience', has made numerous egregious and rookie political mistakes. (1) Two principles advisers playing wink-wink with the foreign press on two critical issues (NAFTA and Iraq War), (2) Susan Rice admits that Obama is unprepared to be commander-in-chief (although accused Sen. Clinton of the same thing), (3) Obama's ties to, and changing non-disclosures about, the Chicago-based Rev. Wright and Tony Rezko, and (4) receiving a sub-committee chairmanship that has oversight over NATO and (exercising his judgment by) choosing to do nothing, and learning little, about the other war going on: the war in Afghanistan.

Fortunately, on the daily conference calls that each political team has with reporters, the Clinton campaign has not touched or raised the the Wright-Obama issue. A lot of people believe--due the negative attacks started by Sen. Obama (with Republican and conservative help) early last year and perfected by Sen. Edwards in November and December--that Sen. Clinton and her team will "do or say anything" to get elected, a charge that is obviously unfair. (Her candidacy has to end for anyone else's, either McCain or Obama's, to begin. If she wins, she's almost unstoppable.) Her team's action--unlike those of the right-wing pundits--to not push this issue I think are a clear testament of her integrity as a candidate and history as a progressive reformer.

And although, as I am finding out through some back reading, Obama specializes in strategic character assassination--making the other guy unelectable while organizing the elements that are opposed to the more established candidates under the rhetoric of change, younger generations, and new politics--as a way of encouraging implosions within establishment candidacies, Sen. Clinton's team taking the high road these past few weeks are points in her favor. In this particular case, trying to paint the Clintons in general, and Sen. Clinton in particular, as a racist is one of the ultimate knock-out moves in a Democratic primary.

The negative campaigning, by former Sen. Edwards and Sen. Obama, relative to the recent negative campaigning of Sen. Clinton has become the subject of controversy. Igniting new appeals after her March 5 primary victories in Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas to leave the race because she is damaging the prospects of the Democrats to win in November, many pundits are suggesting that Clinton campaign is handing McCain talking points.

David Epstein has offered some very interesting observations about negative campaigning in primaries and caucuses:

Take a primary campaign in which one candidate is more extremist relative to the national distribution of voters (e.g., Obama), and the other more moderate (e.g., Clinton). Then negative attacks by the more extremist candidate are less damaging to the party in the national election than negative attacks by the moderate.
Why? Because the attacks by the extremist (taking the Obama-Clinton example) are of the form "Your positions are too far right." So Obama says that Clinton is too hawkish on the war. This is an attack that makes sense in a Democratic primary, but it's certainly not one that McCain will repeat in the general election; if anything, it helps her in November.

But Hillary attacks Obama by saying that he's too dovish, not experienced enough for the tough foreign policy challenges that he would face as president (this is the real message of the 3AM telephone call ad). This is an attack that McCain would certainly repeat and that damages Obama as a general election candidate.

I note this asymmetry not to make value judgments, but just because it's interesting and I hadn't heard it mentioned before. It does clarify a few elements of the current situation, though. To start with, it helps remind us that in a way Obama has been running a negative campaign from the very beginning, saying that Clinton was wrong on Iraq and he was right. In fact, I see his entire policy strategy as copying Clinton on every other major issue, so that these are a draw, and winning on Iraq. (There's also the old politics vs. Yes We Can dimension, but let's not go there now.) Obama hasn't received much flack for these attacks, partly because they bolster Hillary's image as a hawk, which she will certainly want to project in the national election once she's the nominee.

On the other hand, Hillary has to walk a finer line when she attacks Obama, because she's making many of the same points that any Republican opponent would. So she gets accused of disregarding the party's overall interests, sometimes fairly (she absolutely should not be saying that McCain is a better leader than Obama; that's heresy), sometimes not. But the rules are different for her, to some degree because she's Hillary and a Clinton, and to some degree because of the geometry of the situation.

Anyway, these are my early thoughts.

2008-03-10T11:54:00.001-07:00

More Schizophrenia from the Clinton Campaign. The Cost? Democrats Success Post November.

I find it hard to believe that no one in the Hillary campaign management has seen The Contender, a 2000 political thriller starring Joan Allen that asked audiences, what would happen if a woman became president? Yet this movie wasn’t about a Presidential campaign. Rather the premise was built upon the unexpected death of the Vice President and the political fallout of President’s (played by the ever charming and handsome Jeff Bridges) decision to select Joan’s character as the Veep, leading to Senate Confirmation fights, intrigue and Richard Dreyfuss rendering scenery asunder with his teeth. Throughout the film Allen’s qualification for Vice President are brushed under the rug as irrelevant. Rather, the drama circles around her qualification/worthiness to ascend to President of the United States and the pre-9/11 “controversy” of proposing that a woman could be Prez. Indeed, no President would choose a Vice President unless they genuinely believed them prepared to assume the Presidency at a moments notice.

Yet as they have done throughout 2008, the Clinton camp is sending out a series of contradictory messages about Barack Obama and this later bout of bi-polar campaigning has begun to target Democrat’s chances to win the white house. Both Bill and Hillary have begun to make entreaties to the Obama camp, suggesting they would love to see him on the ticket as Vice President. Ignoring the audacity of proposing such a “compromise” when behind in the popular vote, pledged delegates and state count, the campaign’s “hints” at a joint ticket are often paired with a series of arguments as to why Obama is unqualified to be President. Yes, seriously. Are the Clintons unaware that the most important function of the Vice President is that they are next in line for the Presidency? This inability to plan past next week is further evidence of the Clintons “win at all costs” strategy.

The problem for Hillary is that she does not realize the painful truth that she would be a much more effective vice president than Barack Obama would. As my mom said so eloquently over dinner last night, “Presidents are *supposed* to inspire. Why would the Party of F.D.R and J.F.K try and downplay the importance of inspirational rhetoric from the White House? Hillary is just mad because she’s a technocrat, not a leader.” I could not have put it better myself. As President of the Senate and, no doubt, the most powerful VP since Dick Cheney, Clinton would burn the midnight, oil and fight in all the ways necessary to get Senators to bend to her will. But she can not hope to employ the kinds of popular capital from Americans that will be critical to shout down the Pentagon’s inevitable resistance to withdrawal. More importantly, as the U.S. enters a recession and the Democrats hinge their economic plan on short term sacrifice in the form of taxation in order to reap benefits long term from a “green” reconstruction of American economic systems, a President who inspires people towards loftier long term goals is required. In the Second New Deal and into World War II, FDR established what historian Mark Leff calls the “rhetoric of sacrifice” an intense multi level P.R. effort that linked Americans economic sacrifices (Buy war bonds! Save rubber! Don’t eat sugar!) with long term victory overseas and increasedprosperity at home. And it worked. Defying decades of ineffective Presidents, F.D.R was able to motivate the American people to fix the Depression and win the war by inspiring them. Yet as the Clinton campaign continues to limit the impact of inspirational rhetoric, argue that John McCain is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama they hogtie the Democratic agenda and ensure that either an Obama or Clinton presidency will be unable to “work” or “hope” for substantive change.

Clinton v. McCain

2008-03-08T01:22:00.000-08:00

Clinton vs. McCain: An Electoral College Analysis

What does a Clinton-McCain national match-up look like? We already know that the Clinton campaign is good at winning the big states in elections, so I decided to run the most likely scenario of a Clinton led Democratic ticket. I then throw a Clinton-Obama ticket for kicks.

Here are the states that the Democrats can expect to win against McCain with Clinton in the lead( electoral college votes follow the state). Remember that 271 are needed.

California 55
Illinois 21
New York 31
Michigan 17
Ohio 20
Washington 11
Oregon 7
Minnesota 10
Wisconsin 10
Maryland 10
Delaware 3
Pennsylvania 21
New Jersey 15
Connecticut 7
Rhode Island 4
Massachusetts 12
Vermont 3
Maine 4
Hawaii 4

This represents a total of 261 of the 271 needed for victory. (Obama does not poll well in the industrial states other than Illinois.)

These are the additional states that she puts into play:
New Mexico 5
Nevada 5
Arkansas 6
Missouri 11
West Virginia 5
Virginia 13
Florida 27
Missouri 11
Tennessee 11

Any two of these will put her over the top, and any three will secure her victory. Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri seem like the best bets.

In addition, here are the toss ups since John McCain is the opponent (only including those states that could swing either way with McCain in the race):

New Hampshire 4
Texas 34
Iowa 7

If it were a Clinton-Obama ticket, here are the additional states he puts into play:

North Carolina 15
South Carolina 8
Georgia 15
Louisiana 9
Kansas 6
Colorado 9

The Clinton-Obama ticket probably makes Florida and Missouri guarentees, giving the Democrats the election handily at 299 of 271.

Regarding the House of Representatives and the Senate, Clinton's coattails should put the following states in play: New Mexico, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, California, Michigan, and Nevada. (I can get a list of vacant seats in the House and Senate from somewhere as well.) We don't yet know about Ohio or Pennsylvania yet, but Gov. Ed Rendell (PA) has endorsed her.

This is the scenario that the super-delegates should be thinking about. It would be odd to allow the candidate who has lost California, New York, Florida, New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Okalahoma by substantial margins to clinch the Democratic nomination based on caucus wins in Kansas, Nebraska, and Idaho, coupled with a combination of white independent/Republican and an understandably skewed black vote in South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Virginia primaries. In other words, "if Obama does somehow manage to become the nominee, the Democrats may well turn out to have pulled a Dukakis (Mondale, McGovern) once again. They'll be sending the candidate who lost in their primaries all the states they must win in the general election, and the one utterly without a resume, to do battle against the party that has dominated presidential election contests since World War II and a candidate who is a legitimate national hero."

Clinton, on the other hand, will bring in the Democratic stongholds as well as reach deeply into the Republican safe and border states, giving Democrats control of the executive.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein has this, which is similar to my exercise but predicts different numbers.

Why Sen. Clinton Won't Destroy the Democrats

2008-03-08T01:08:00.000-08:00

Why Sen. Clinton's Nomination Won't Kill the Democratic Chances of Victory

Can the Democrats afford a Clinton victory? Yes, we can. Even from a brokered convention.

First of all, the traditional, and most reliable, part of the Democratic base (with the exception of African-Americans) has consistently supported Clinton.

Second, "new voters" are a myriad bunch. There are at least two kinds of new voters. The first is partisans: young people who have become energized by the politics of the last eight years. These people generally graduated college in the wake of the dot com bust and the war on terror: 2000-2006. Some of have become partisans of the left and others of the right. Partisans of the left will support any Democrat. (You don't become energized and then just leave.)

The second kind are the post-partisans. These people love the Obama, beyond politics rhetoric. Not sure what to do about them.

Without Clinton, a lot of women and older voters may turn to McCain.

The different candidates bring different southern states into play. Tennessee, West Virginia, and Arkansas (they both share Missouri and Virginia) are Clinton's whereas Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama's are Obama's.

Clearly a Clinton-Obama ticket solves a lot of these problems. Black turnout will be just as high to elect the first black vice president, particularly because Obama will still be on the stump as the vice-president. Women, Latinos, Asians, and gays will turn out for Clinton's election as well as the "one-issue" independents: peaceniks and those worried about the economy.

I imagine that the anti-war bloc will continue to solidify as McCain makes the case for war. (Already Clinton is consistently beating McCain in head to head match-ups in the polls on the growing anti-war bloc alone. The economy is also only going to get worse. With gas prices rising, due to the summer increase, the cost of 'recession-proof' foods such as pizza and fries rising, and increase inflation on the dollar, the economy is very structurally-weak. (It's basically the Carter economy of the 70s.) This will create a powerful pro-Democratic electorate.

If we do a state by state analysis, Clinton puts the following state in play that Democrats have had a hard time holding onto in the past two presidential elections: New Mexico (5), Arkansas (6), Iowa (7), Florida (27), Missouri (11), Ohio (20) and Nevada (5). I think I write another post on this.

The Cost of a Clinton Nomination

2008-03-05T05:33:00.000-08:00

Can the Democratic party afford a Clinton victory?

Pragmatism is the philosophical calling card of most Clinton supporters. Citing her “35 years of experience in politics” her fans claims that her style and tactics will allow her to pass sweeping progressive legislation over the defiance of Republican Senators who, we can say with confidence, will dig their heels in against a Clinton White house. These same pragmatists downplay Clinton’s inability to work with her own party in the early years of the Clinton administration to pass universal healthcare. She has, they say, “learned her lesson” and the evidence they cite are her statements in the Democratic primary debates pledging undying support for Barack Obama where he to be the Presidential nominee for the Democratic Party

Yet can anyone who saw Clinton’s pyrrhic victories in Texas and Ohio believe that anything has changed since the healthcare fights of the early 90s? The exit polls indicate that Clinton's margins of victory were assured by a series of negative campaign ads, the now infamous red phone ad, and legitimate mistakes by the Obama campaign regarding the mini-scandal re: NAFTA and the Canadian government. It took nearly three months of negative campaigning combined with false congeniality during debates for Clinton to maneuver a kernel of fear into an electorate suffused with hope for “change.” Yet if she does not capture the party's nomination (why she must not below) she not only deligitimizes her requisite support for Barack as typical Clinton doublespeak, she has handed the Republicans a playbook on Obama when only a few weeks earlier right wing strategists were ringing their hands wondering how they would go negative against "hope" and "change."

And to what end? With a sudden increase in super delegates and a likely victory in the Texas delegate count, Barack Obama maintains a nearly insurmountable lead in both the combined and pledged delegate tallys. Upcoming Obama victories in Wyoming and Mississippi assure, that lead will continue to grow until Pennsylvania where Clinton may be able to win by another ten points. But because fewer and fewer Democratic voters are up for grabs it seems impossible for Clinton to enter the August Convention with a lead in pledged delegates. Clinton supporters please stop citing Bill Clinton's clinching of the nomination in June of '92, we all know this is a vastly different contest. In 2008, the Clinton pragmatists are going to have to engage in the kind of political self reflection that seems impossible for their candidate, and ask themselves. How can Clinton broker a superdelegate victory at the convention without exploding the Democratic party’s existing coalition and sacrificing the party’s chances of taking the white house?

New Voters: The failures of the Bush Administration and the ease with which those failures can be linked to the economic tidings of most Americans has energized a set of voters to take notice of the electoral process who otherwise would not. New voters are a complex coalition all their own, and while most vote for Obama, not all do. However, what does unify them is a sense that politics is naturally "unfair" and "corrupted." Whether these charges are true they provide intellectual justification for voter apathy and give these voters an "easy out" when politics proves just how corrupt it is. The problem for the Democrats is a superdelegate decided nomination is just the out these voters need and the electoal map is such that it does not matter how energized people in Ohio, New York and PA are about the Democratic party, the Republicans are electoral college incumbents in too many states to take for granted.

Southern Swing States: If the democrats are going to pull places like Mississippi, Virginia and Missouri they are going to need an active and energized African American base. And in a world where Hillary Clinton wins the nomination via pledged delegates, you probably could count on them. But in a world where the nomination is decided by superdelegates in the wake of a primary season where African Americans participated in record numbers you risk alienating huge chunks of that constituency. Though Clinton supporters can’t seem to fathom it, the last two Presidential elections have begun a serious narrative in the African American community about political disfranchisement in Florida and Ohio and the futlity of participation in the electoral process. If the Democratic party engages in a leftwing version of the Supreme Court’s Bush v. Gore (which is how the media will portray such a decision, Chris Matthews began that narrative last night) African Americans will, quite simply, not show up.

Women: Clinton's only hope. If Clinton is awarded the win by superdelegates (in a decidedly unfeminist way as it would not be democratic) her only prayer is to ratchet up the pressure on women to support her. However she has a bit of a problem. Her majorities among women in the Democratc primary are slim compared to Obama's majorities among African Americans. Conservative women take it as a point of pride to not like her as her version of empowerment has little to do with their lives. Ironically, Clinton will most likely capture the youth white women vote in November and if she can turn that vote out, she has a chance. It's a much smaller coalition and, as always, relies upon Republicans not showing up for John McCain for her to be victorious. Either way one thing is clear. The last few days before the 2nd super Tuesday reveal that when asked whether she wants the Democrats to win more than she wants to be President, Clinton responded in a way unsurprising to her detractors.

Does Sen. Obama Have Momemtum?

2008-02-29T15:26:00.000-08:00

Does Sen. Obama Have Momentum?

An interesting, and thoroughly convincing analysis of why the automatic/ super- delegates of the party shouldn't force Clinton out of the campaign early. His argument is basically: " Obama has picked up 196 of his delegates with a total of 5.8 million votes in ten caucuses, a number that Clinton chews up and nearly swallows with her margin of victory in California alone."

Washington state obligingly provided a demonstration with its recent "beauty contest" primary. On February 9th, Washington held a caucus that Obama won by nearly 40 points with 250,000 voters (a relatively small turnout). Two weeks later, the state held a primary that didn't count. The state didn't have any other major issues on the ballot. Voters were forced to sign a declaration swearing they belonged to the party whose primary they were voting in. Finally, the vote occurred after several weeks of solid Obama victories, which would presumably serve to inspire Obama and depress the Clinton vote. All these factors suggest that only the most dedicated voters would turn up, and that any undecided voters would be likely to be swayed towards Obama by the momentum he has built up.
A million voters showed up for the "meaningless" primary. Obama’s margin of victory shrunk to just 5 points. Without exit polls, demographic popularity can’t be assessed with certainty, but many of Washington's counties have nice clean demographic splits. Yakima County, which is 40% Hispanic, went 53-43 for Clinton. Cowlitz County, a white working class county, went 58-39 for Clinton. Overall, Clinton won or tied in 17 counties, which means that the delegate apportioning would have had very different results with a primary--particularly if voters had thought it counted.
Thus, examined closely, Obama's seemingly overwhelming victories show no certain momentum and no measurable progress in the key demographic groups. Democrat voters have now been subjected to a month or more of overwhelming media onslaught about Obama's victories. Yet the Washington primary, held just last week, strongly suggests that white and Hispanic Democrat voters have remained unconvinced....
If the Democratic nomination were the end result of the process, we could all marvel at the Obama campaign's genius at effectively making use of the party's delegate apportionment system and liberal caucuses. However, the nominee in this case only gets the opportunity--and the responsibility--to take on a popular maverick moderate in the general election.
The consistency of the exit polls strongly suggests that a pledged delegate count is almost meaningless as an indicator of the most viable candidate. Whether the Democrats opt for Clinton or Obama, the demographic tradeoffs have thus far proved so unyielding that they should be paramount in the final decision, rendering delegate counts irrelevant.
Any practical assessment of the primary results reveals that Hillary Clinton has won the usually essential demographics consistently and by wide margins. Obama’s coalition of blacks and highly educated voters will not be enough on their own. Against Hillary's demographic support, Obama can offer his strong showing among white independents and Republicans and argue that his support will carry over to the general. However, Clinton has won the independent vote in primaries nearly as often as Obama has, many states by equally large margins, although Obama has won the majority of these voters....
The combination of caucus primaries and strong independent/Republican presence has already overridden the voter will. The candidate who has lost California, New York, Florida, New Jersey, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Okalahoma by substantial margins is ahead on the strength of caucus wins in Kansas, Nebraska, and Idaho, coupled with a combination of white independent/Republican and an understandably skewed black vote in South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, and Virginia primaries. Currently, even if caucus votes are added in, Clinton appears to be ahead in total Democat votes. If the entire primary season were to run its course with no significant demographic change, Clinton will win the Democrat vote overall, even assuming all caucus voters are Democrats. It's hard to argue that the party’s popular will hasn't been clearly expressed in favor of Hillary Clinton.

It's a very powerful argument, I think, and one that should give voters a pause about bringing the process to an early close. Moreover, it suggests the importance of a Clinton-Obama unity ticket. And yes, I have been saying this for a while now.

Good News

2008-02-24T20:22:00.001-08:00

Good News For the Dartmouth Observer

ChienWen and I wanted to extend a hearty welcome to our newest co-blogger: Kwame Holmes. Kwame is also an intellectual based in Chicago. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in History at the University of Illinois. Soon, he'll send me his "blurb" and I'll put it on the side with the rest of us.

In addition to his impressive command of many subjects social, cultural, and historical, Kwame is a proud part of the Obama demographic and is here to "balance" Observer coverage (read: opining) about the upcoming American presidential and congressional elections. I doubt, however, that his contributions will be limited to jousting over the best leader for the 'free world' and will include many of his reflections on social power, social movements, and politically-salient and ordering identities (in America).

And, in other positive news, Tina Fey (of SNL) has a great skit about Sen. Hillary Clinton, "Bitch is the New Black."

More of the same for and from Clinton while Obama sharpens his message:

2008-02-21T11:42:00.000-08:00

More of the same for and from Clinton while Obama sharpens his message:

Did Hillary pick up staffers from the Giuliani campaign or something? I don't get this new version of "win it in Florida." that her campaign seems to be going for. It's the like the Heroes (trademark) version of presidential politicis, "Win Texas. Win the world." (duh-duh-duuuuh)

In all seriousness, things are looking particularly bad for the Clinton campaign and it's getting closer to the point where the true origins of increasing voter malaise towards Hillary need to be uncovered. Not only because it will be intellectually interesting to see how so spectacularly a major front runner can come crashing down to earth in a Presidential campaign, but also because her campaign needs to prescribe solutions for what has become a serious threat to her presidential bid.

The recent staffing changes at high levels of the Clinton campaign have done nothing to alter her message, change her speaking style or reach out to new constituencies. Why didn’t the introduction of a new campaign manager also introduce a shift in Clinton’s message? It’s not unreasonable to assume that both Hillary and Bill are less willing to delegate campaign strategy than earlier reports indicated. Whether my speculation is valid or not, her unwillingness or inability to change the tone of her campaign illustrates to Americans that she doesn't have the ability to offer "change" in Washington.

And no longer can Clinton strategists make backroom jokes about the potentially amorphous interpretation of the meaning of "change." In his nearly 45 minute victory speech in Texas, Obama explicitly reached to the left and proposed some of the most sweeping federal social policy the country has seen since the Second New Deal. While keeping the crowd energized with mini bursts of inspirational rhetoric, he began the critical process of melding images of American patriotism and nationalism with socially progressive ideas. (more on Barack’s attempt to model the U.S. on Western European Democratic Socialist states in a later entry)

Some might note that this was, in general, a comparatively reserved Obama crowd, they were presented with quite a lot to think about. The parts of the speech where specific policy proposal and rhetorical energy collided will be an important gauge for Obama's ability to wrap progressive ideas into a message of "service, honor and patriotism." His best moment dealt with his promise to give every college student a $4,000 credit for tuition. That’s a big chunk of change and, very easily, the kind of thing that the right wing could pounce on as “tax and spend” liberalism. But he brilliant countered with the requirement that students who received these grants will have to complete a certain number of hours of community service in order to receive the funds. The implications for this program are transformative and every left leaning person who supports the Clinton campaign, yes even you, needs to take a serious gander at it.

Currently, most college students survive on a combination of parental funds, student loans and a second job. Student loans are the biggest economic burden on students as high interest rates means that the larger their initial bill is, the longer their loans will be a drag on their economic future. By offering to cut the initial tuition bill by $4,000 Obama’s plan will lower the amount of interest they accrue each year, making the debt easier to pay off quickly. I also suspect this legislation will have a provision for lowered interests rates on Federal student loans.

Even more important, Obama is laying out a practical way to enact the feel good, “yay unity!” portions of his speeches. By requiring community service in hospitals, retirement homes, community gardens and so forth, Obama will put young people to work fulfilling the emotional infrastructure that can make living in poverty less psychological damaging. Enforced or not, by when community service becomes part of what America does via a mandate in federal legislation, that sends a signal to everyone. For middle class college students, close contact with economically disadvantaged people will break down some of the false cultural barriers that allow most Americans to remain apathetic about poverty and to understand poor people as suckers of the government teat. It will help to erode the physical and social distances between the suburbs and the inner city. The very thing he has been talking about throughout his campaign.

It will be interesting to see what the Clinton campaign will do to counter Obama. Exit polls indicate that nearly every one of her talking points of the last week were rejected by voters. Most notably, voters were seriously turned off by the negative attacks orchestrated by the Clinton campaign in the days leading up to the campaign. If anyone was concerned that Obama’s failure to “cite” a personal friend during an effective portion of a speech would hurt his support among Democrats, they are no longer. The next few weeks are going to be critical for Clinton, let’s she if “yes she can” enact “change” within her campaign that Americans can “believe in.”

Media Double Standards

2008-02-19T15:48:00.000-08:00

Media Double Standards

From a great article about how Clinton's narrative about the race are trapping her, whereas Obama's are freeing him.

Divergence in tone is one thing, double standards [in the are another. And it’s the latter that most galls the former advisers to the other, now-departed, Democratic candidates. “Obama has been able to get away with a stunning amount of hypocrisy that would get called on her,” says one such operative. “They’ve run the nastiest, most deceptive pieces of paid media: the mailer they did lying about her health-care plan, with the Harry and Louise look-alikes. The idea that it took Hillary growling Tony Rezko’s name in a debate to get any national coverage. How he complained in Iowa about 527s and then had them supporting him like crazy in Nevada and California. And nobody says a peep about it. It’s fucking comical!”

There are countless other examples of this syndrome, both large and small. The way that Clinton’s famous fumbling of a question about whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to have driver’s licenses in a debate last fall was hammered on for weeks—whereas Obama’s flubbing of the same question in the next debate was essentially let slide. The way that Obama’s evisceration of his rival in his stump speeches was applauded by the media—whereas Clinton’s plunge into negative territory was widely condemned. The way that Clinton was roundly criticized for being inaccessible, and thus unaccountable, to the press—when Obama has since January been even less available for questioning than she.

The Questioning Leads to the Thinking

2008-02-19T15:14:00.001-08:00

The Questioning Leads to the Thinking

And so a great philosopher, Martin Heidegger, has said.

Recently, on the campaign trail, the Democratic Party's "workhorse", Sen. Hillary Clinton, has been saying, "When the lights are out, when the campaigns are done, and when everyone has gone home, who can you count on?" At first, Democrats were behind her, moved slowly, and then more swiftly to Sen. Barak Obama. The party sentiment seemed to be: when the lights were out, the Clintons would look out for themselves, but Sen. Obama would remain true to his pledges and beliefs.

After some magnificent, though expected wins from Maine to the Washington Caucus to the Potomac primaries in the Super Tuesday aftermath, Sen. Obama has become the front runner. With that status has also come heightened scrutiny, with more voters and pundits asking, "What's this show all about anyway?" After the next few weeks I predict: Republicans and conservatives are going to get off the Obama bandwagon soon, with Democrats who want to win shortly behind them.

David Brook's column, I think, accurate portrays what many of us less starry-eyed youth have been saying all along:

The afflicted had already been through the phases of Obama-mania — fainting at rallies, weeping over their touch screens while watching Obama videos, spending hours making folk crafts featuring Michelle Obama’s face. These patients had experienced intense surges of hope-amine, the brain chemical that fuels euphoric sensations of historic change and personal salvation.
But they found that as the weeks went on, they needed more and purer hope-injections just to preserve the rush. They wound up craving more hope than even the Hope Pope could provide, and they began experiencing brooding moments of suboptimal hopefulness. Anxious posts began to appear on the Yes We Can! Facebook pages. A sense of ennui began to creep through the nation’s Ian McEwan-centered book clubs...
Barack Obama vowed to abide by the public finance campaign-spending rules in the general election if his opponent did. But now he’s waffling on his promise. Why does he need to check with his campaign staff members when deciding whether to keep his word?
Obama says he is practicing a new kind of politics, but why has his PAC sloshed $698,000 to the campaigns of the superdelegates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics? Is giving Robert Byrd’s campaign $10,000 the kind of change we can believe in?
If he values independent thinking, why is his the most predictable liberal vote in the Senate? A People for the American Way computer program would cast the same votes for cheaper.
And should we be worried about Obama’s mountainous self-confidence?
These doubts lead O.C.S. sufferers down the path to the question that is the Unholy of the Unholies for Obama-maniacs: How exactly would all this unity he talks about come to pass?
How is a 47-year-old novice going to unify highly polarized 70-something committee chairs? What will happen if the nation’s 261,000 lobbyists don’t see the light, even after the laying on of hands? Does The Changemaker have the guts to take on the special interests in his own party — the trial lawyers, the teachers’ unions, the AARP?
The Gang of 14 created bipartisan unity on judges, but Obama sat it out. Kennedy and McCain created a bipartisan deal on immigration. Obama opted out of the parts that displeased the unions. Sixty-eight senators supported a bipartisan deal on FISA. Obama voted no. And if he were president now, how would the High Deacon of Unity heal the breach that split the House last week?

What will a politics of hope look like if it's worse and more nasty than anything the Clintonites or the McCain team has engaged in (e.g. trying to intimate black superdelegates in support of Clinton)?

A Pundit's Lament

2008-02-16T18:22:00.000-08:00

Wounded in the House of Friends

One of Sen. Clinton's rallying cries is that she can withstand the Republican machine, and that she won't go down without a fight. The HuffPo has an interesting piece on how it was her party, the Dems, and not the Republicans, who seem intent on doing her in.

Every time I hear a Democrat argue for Barack Obama's candidacy by saying that we don't want to go back to the partisanship of the '90s, I realize that while the Clintons may have won the battle back then, the conservatives won the war. A decade after Bill Clinton's impeachment for trying to cover up a bit of extramarital nookie, the common wisdom -- at both ends of the political spectrum -- seems to be that Bill and Hill somehow encouraged all the insanity thrown at them from the far right, that they brought it on themselves.

What's even crazier is that people truly believe Obama, with his boyish good looks and vague platitudes of amorphous "change" and "yes we can," will somehow defuse the haters on the right. In Yes We Can Land, the Republican attack machine that's already spit-shined and ready to roll will back down in the face of that winning smile and polished speaking style, inaugurating an era of love, peace and non-partisanship. And for the topper, maybe Dick Cheney will spontaneously burst into flames!

Hillary offers change -- certainly a huge change from the last eight years. And the title of first female president of the United States is no small taters. But Democrats say sorry, you're not changey enough. Knowing how to work with Republicans and actually get legislation passed becomes that old slur "Washington insider." Knowing her policy shit inside out, and talking about it on the stump, becomes "Not inspiring enough." I feel like it's only a matter of time before her universal health care plan becomes "socialized medicine."

Unlike Mr. Sach's, however, I'll never count a Clinton out.

Is Senator Clinton the Most Electable Democrat?

2008-02-14T00:16:00.000-08:00

Is Senator Clinton the Most Electable Democrat?

There's been a lot of chatter lately on the polls that show Sen. Clinton narrowly ahead (48-47) of Sen. McCain in a match-up poll, and Sen. Obama with a slightly large gap over McCain (49-47). This has led to the meme that Sen. Obama is more electable and the Hillary is not.

However, what most laymen who read polls fail to understand is the snapshot nature of polls, when public opinion, in fact, is quite dynamic. If you look at the (mostly exit poll) data, you would note several statistical regularities that hold up in the match-up polls: (a) currently independents favor McCain, (b) men favor McCain, and (c) Republicans are itching to run against Clinton.

Three pieces of evidence, however, should turn us away from the naive "Obama is more electable" narrative.

(i) In the current polls, Obama-McCain, and Clinton-McCain are in a statistical tie. The margin of error is four points, and both candidates are always within 2 of McCain, which has not changed for a few weeks. Moreover, in three way races between Obama-McCain-Clinton, which would never happen in reality, Clinton beats Obama handily and loses to McCain narrowly.

(ii) As late as early January, Clinton, according to polls, had the support of 40% of the Democratic black community.

(iii) McCain, after supposedly wrapping up the nomination, continues to lose states to Mike Huckabee, and requires prominent conservatives to assure everyone that he is a "real conservative. Even in states McCain wins, he splits the independent vote with Governor Huckabee, and looses the evangelicals in droves.

Looking at (ii), we now know that this black support has dropped to 10-15%. Why is that? Mostly the bad news that came out of South Carolina. That suggests that even a poll that was stable through the fall, summer, and last winter can dramatically change in the course of campaigning. In short, support is dynamic and responds to campaigning. Let's keep that in the back of our minds.

In light of (i), a large function of Obama's appeal to independents and the disaffected is that so far no record of politicking has come to light. For many Democrats, he is an unknown quantity, and they tend to support Clinton. More importantly, when Obama and Clinton divide the electorate, McCain has a larger plurality. If Obama was so popular among disaffected Republicans, and we have evidence that McCain does not appeal to the disaffected conservatives in particular, then Obama, and not McCain, should have the largest plurality of voters. Yet McCain continues to receive the potential votes of Republicans--some of whom may like Obama and hate Hillary--who vote straight Republican tickets.

This piece of evidence suggests that Clinton is more electable because the Democratic base likes her, and she can spend more of our resources in outreach, and making a competent case for Democratic policies, than Obama who would likely need to introduce himself to the voters. We know that voters who tend to meet Clinton late in the game (within the last week and on the day of voting) tend to break toward her.

Moreover, this is why recently, the center-left and the rightists have been comparing Obamania to a cult and attacking Sen. Obama rather than Sen. Clinton. Because the voters don't know him, the sooner his opponents can define the narrative (establishing him a media phenomena, a rich liberal, a campaign built on platitudes, an inexperienced politician whose never finished a term i office, a timid politician who votes present, doesn't report for Senate duty, isn't prepared to deal with the terrorist threat, surrounded by liberal law professors when two Supreme Court vacancies are up--in short treating him like they treated Edwards last election), the easier he'll be able to beat in the general election.

Yet, one could say that precisely because Clinton is known, the independents won't move toward her. This is where (iii) and political independents come into play.

The conventional wisdom is that McCain will have to go to his right to win his party over, which includes choosing a rightist governor as his running mate. Moving to his right, however, pushes McCain away from independents in two ways. (a) What independents value is his maverick
streak; pandering to the right is the opposite of maverick. (b) What the right-wing loves is to attack Hillary, and what independents hate are smear campaigns. Precisely because Hillary is learning how to campaign non-negatively, and precisely because her only hope of keeping Obama-supporters in the general election is to continue doing so, the right-wing will look absolutely nuts and drive the independents away in droves.

The alternative, that McCain doesn't placate his base, is that the united Democratic-base, feminist independents, and Hillary-leaning independents turn out for Hillary in the election and the Republicans don't. Giving Clinton the election handily.

This doesn't even factor is the Latino and Asian voters, which Bush won in 2000 and increased his margins in 2004, or the percentage of women in the electorate and how they seem to dislike the politics of pile-on.

Basically, we Clinton wins either way. If only she and her team were making the case.

Is Senator Obama More Electable?

2008-02-11T22:00:00.000-08:00

Is Senator Obama The Most Electable Democrat?

You didn't hear it from me:

It's not a pretty picture for the Democrats. But the main thing is that Washington, Louisiana and Nebraska account for only 25 electoral votes between them, fewer than the state of Florida all by itself, and two of them (Nebraska and Louisiana) voted solidly for George Bush in 2005 -- meaning they are hardly bellweathers for Democratic candidates.
Nobody would be better pleased than me to see Obama showing great strength (in a prior post I said I hope he gets the nomination as he seems like a softer target for McCain), but it's simply stupid to say he's doing that, and in fact all Obama really accomplished over the weekend was just to win largely insignificant Washington State, which voted Democratic in 2004. As the map clearly shows, the states that really matter to Democrats in the actual election contest against the Republicans are California, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts and Michigan. Clinton has prevailed in every single one of these states to have been contested so far except for Illinois -- and that's Obama's home turf. The only one left is Pennsylvania, which doesn't hold its primary until April 22.

In other words, if Obama does somehow manage to become the nominee, the Democrats may well turn out to have pulled a Dukakis (Mondale, McGovern) once again. They'll be sending the candidate who lost in their primaries all the states they must win in the general election, and the one utterly without a resume, to do battle against the party that has dominated presidential election contests since World War II and a candidate who is a legitimate national hero.

Vis a vis the electoral map, here are the additional states that Clinton puts into play that Bush won in 2004: New Mexico*, Arizona+, Arkansas, Iowa*, Florida+, Missouri* and Nevada
(*indicate states that Obama also puts into play)

So, to sum it up: Sen. Clinton, assuming that all of the blue states stay blue, puts the following states into play at the presidential level (electoral votes in parentheses): New Mexico (5), Arkansas (6), Iowa (7), Florida (27), Missouri (11), and Nevada (5). Given the slim margins of the 2000 and 2004 races, this represents a significant amount of votes. Regarding the House of Representatives and the Senate, Clinton's coattails should put the following states in play: New Mexico, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, California, Michigan, and Nevada. (I can get a list of vacant seats in the House and Senate from somewhere as well.) We don't yet know about Ohio or Pennsylvania yet, but Gov. Ed Rendell (PA) has endorsed her.

+If John McCain chooses Gov. Crist as his running mate, then Florida could be more of a toss-up and makes the Latino and African-American vote more important. (Bush took 40% of the Latino vote in 2004.) John McCain is also the Senator from Arizona.

Since everyone believes that blue states will stay blue, then Clinton's ability to peel off a few red states from Bush 2004 coalition gives her the election by a comfortable margin in the 2008 electoral college.

An Amazing Political Journey

2008-02-07T10:04:00.000-08:00

An Amazing Political Journey

From the LA Times:

Mimi Vitello, a nurse who hosted a round table for Barack Obama in her backyard last month in Van Nuys, is on her way to vote.

But not necessarily for Obama....

"I've gotten more engaged than I have in the past, and this election is more important to me," says Vitello, who can't recall ever doing so much soul-searching before casting a vote.

Walking toward Burbank Boulevard as the sun burns through the morning chill, Vitello explains her political evolution. She used to think politicians were all alike, so why waste time following such a down and dirty, money-driven process? And besides, she thought, what difference could her vote make?

But that detachment ended after her vote for President Bush in the year 2000. Vitello, who grew up in a Republican home in Covina, came to believe she'd made a terrible mistake. She found both the march to war and the results of the invasion a huge turnoff. She switched parties, registered her pique in a letter to Republican Congressman David Dreier -- who had once paid a visit to the home of her politically active parents -- and voted for John Kerry in 2004.

So it felt like just one more step in her political evolution to find Barack Obama in her backyard.

"I did kind of get swept up in the 'Yes we can' movement," says Vitello, who found the Illinois senator a natural, inspirational speaker with his own manner of star power.

When I checked in with Vitello last week to ask if I could write about her ultimate choice and how she made it, she told me she was all but certain to vote for Obama.

Then came last Thursday's debate in Los Angeles, and Sunday's town hall meeting, and Vitello started wondering if she'd dismissed Clinton too hastily. She'd lost some of her senatorial distance, Vitello thought, and become more likable without losing any of her no-nonsense relationship with complex issues.

Crossing the boulevard Tuesday morning to get to her polling place, Vitello strides with purpose, comfortable with a decision she has worked through thoughtfully. At the Burbank Oaks Apartments, she takes her ballot and does her duty. And Hillary Clinton gets the vote of a woman who had Barack Obama in her backyard.

Yes, Vitello says, it helped that Clinton is female. But it was about more than either gender or race.

She decided Obama's inspirational call for change was no match for the trench work Clinton is capable of. As a nurse, Vitello has studied with interest the national healthcare reform proposals by the two candidates, and she's found Clinton's a bit more to her liking and more realistic.

I can really understand where she is coming from.

Immediate Reactions to the State of the Democratic Race

2008-02-06T13:35:00.000-08:00

Immediate Reactions to the State of the Democratic Race

As any reader of this blog knows, I am a Clinton fan. I've been behind her for years and am excited by the progress that she has made as a candidate and a politician. As a political and registered independent, I've been proud to support her campaign.

When the Democratic race first started, I was excited that as long as John Edwards, Chris Dodd, or Joe Biden did not win, I would be happy no matter who took the nomination. This feeling of satisfaction continued even when the race effectively narrowed to Senators Obama and Clinton over the summer.

Recently, however, I've stopped feeling the Obama-love. I've always liked Clinton more on substance but watching the "feeling" that some affluent (and oftentimes jaded) liberals get from Obama has made me proud of his candidacy. Occasionally, when listening to his speeches, I've even felt moved. When the feeling wears off, I find myself irritated that his supporters don't demand more. Change is so very non-specific.

Part of my objection is that, in a nutshell, we're being asked to take it on faith that Obama will know what he's doing when he gets into the White House. (The irony that the Democracy may answer years of chafing under Bush with another young, ambitious (arrogant) male who wants to "learn on the job" strikes me as ironic and tragic.) It also makes me a little nervous.

This is probably why I am annoyed with the video, which has a lot to do with my revulsion at America's culture of celebrity.

Why Hilary Clinton is Not Out of the Race Yet

2007-12-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

Why Hilary Clinton is Not Out of the Race Yet

Since October 30th's debate, Democratic front-runner Sen. Hilary Clinton (D-NY) has been (depicted as) sliding to parity with Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) in the crucial early states of Iowa and New Hampshire. After a very poorly performing summer, Obama seems back in his element, and, in combination with clever attacks by former Sen. and Vice-President nominee John Edwards (D-NC), the once inevitable Clinton machine, who had, in September seemed to have all but wrapped up the race, is vulnerable and poised for a defeat.

Supporters of Sen. Clinton for president, however, need not be worried for three reasons. One, the best part of the Clinton machine, and one of the reasons that she would make such a wonderful and effective executive, is its attention to detail and voter turnout. For those with longer political memories, you will recall the flap, earlier in 2007 (around May), then Sen. Clinton's campaign staff was thinking about skipping Iowa entirely and focusing its efforts on New Hampshire and South Carolina. Her main advisers knew that campaigning in the state was going to be a time and money suck, with little likelihood of a first place finish (particularly given Edwards has been living in the state since the end of the Kerry coalition). In fact, in May 2007, Sen. Clinton estimated support was 21% compared with 23% and 29% for Senators Obama and Edwards, respectively.

What did Sen. Clinton do in the face of such odds? Answer: enlist the support of former governor Tom Vilsack and Democratic legendary organizer Teresa Vilmain. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Ms. Vilmain first organized in Iowa in 1988, at age 29, working for eventual Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. This time, Democrats' turnout in the state that kicks off the presidential race is expected to set a record, given excitement about the seven-candidate presidential field and the prospect of taking back the White House. More than at any time since the caucuses gained prominence 32 years ago, organizers such as Ms. Vilmain are searching for ways to draw voters who have never participated in a caucus." Vilmain and Vilsack, who together engineered a two-term victory for the Democratic governor, have built a formidable political network of enthused Clinton caucus goers.

They're hard work has paid off: in October, at the height of Clinton enthusiasm, Sen. Clinton had 29%, compared to 22% and 23% for Senators Obama and Edwards, respectively. (The month of November in the wake of the October 30th debate, however, was tough and now Clinton has sunk to 25%, with 28% and 23% for Obama and Edwards, respectively.) What's crucial to note is that at the time her campaign staff--the Clinton machine--made choices about investment strategies, Edwards and not Obama, and the prospects of an Edwards-Obama two-way race, were the greatest dangers for Clinton. Clinton's actions, and the experience of her team, made what should have been a cakewalk for Edwards and an easily media opportunity for Obama, into a competitive three-way race that for a long time she dominated.

The Clinton strategy has always relied on New Hampshire as its firewall, a lead that has been eroding since Obama found some holiday momentum. Rather than conceding, or sticking to the same strategy that she had been using, Clinton dispatched another Democratic legendary organizer, Michael Whouley, to New Hampshire.

Mr. Whouley is a wizard of turnout victories. Marc Ambinder summarizes the modern magician this way: "In 1992, Whouley served as national field director for the Clinton-Gore ticket. In 2000, Whouley is credited with forcing Gore to engage in more retail policking, a decision that helped to save his campaign in New Hampshire against Bill Bradley. In 2004, he helped John Kerry turn around his fortunes in Iowa. He was Kerry's anointed field czar in the general election, and, horrors, actually found himself conducting telephonic phone briefings with the press." Moreover, Whouley's proteges David Barnhardt and Karen Hicks have been in New Hampshire for months and designed the Clinton campaign's sophisticated turnout program, he as caucus director and she as the planner.

Second, Bill Clinton is big asset to her candidacy and campaign. His constant gaffes and screw ups are a bit annoying, but he still does have star power, and is one of the best centrist Democrat strategists whose actually run for the party's nomination. Unfortunately, former President Bill Clinton sucessfully came out of no where to win the nomination, and thus, by existing, give some of his legacy to Sen. Obama as well.

Third, the Democratic Coalition will probably pull through for Hilary in ways that it cannot for Obama or Edwards. Sadly, there is some decent statistical indicators that voting Latinos tend not to vote for black candidates and have negative perceptions of American blacks in general. I'm afraid that not only with the Latino vote tend toward Hilary in the Southwest, but might also defect to Republicans in the general election. (Now of course we have that whole immigration discourse to deal with, but we'll see.) Oddly, though, it's hard to know how much Latino support for Clinton will be off set by white support for Obama, precisely because he is black.

Moreover, significant portions of the black vote loves the Clintons and trust them, and centrist Democrats in general, to fight for middle and working class black issues. Senator Clinton has played her cards right in highlighting the gendered dimension of race, particularly with respect to AIDS and HIV, giving voice to discourses that many black politicians overlook when talking about the "community." The gender issue also plays well with working class women who tend to see the glass ceiling as something real and right above them. This sense of Senator Clinton putting in her time and working hard plays to their sympathies as well as attracts union support.

Lastly, gay and lesbians, particularly after the Donnie McClurklin flap, wonder what an Edwards or Obama Democratic party would look like for them. Even after the dreadful "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" compromise that resulted from Bill Clinton polarizing the issue of gays in the military before he was willing to spend political capital, gay leaders seem to trust the Clinton's more (no surprises) that the more conservative Edwards and the more symbolically tied to black social conservatism Obama.

Predictions for Iowa and New Hampshire, and the Early Primaries

2007-12-19T10:47:00.001-08:00

Predictions for Iowa and New Hampshire

As everyone disappears for the Christmas and New Year's holidays, I wanted to get my predictions for the first two contests, Iowa and New Hampshire, out there.

Iowa

Iowa, as we know, has attracted a lot of attention this election cycle because a crowded field on both sides, as well as several major names being in play, makes the state's caucuses a must-win for some of the lesser known candidates, and a headache for candidates with higher numbers. One of the most important things to note for Iowa is the vote-switching that takes place as the some caucus-goers settle on their second choices whereas other try to create momentum for their primary (no-pun intended) choices. The pressures begin as soon as the caucus-attendees arrive in the parking lot to witness which delegates seem enthusiastic about their candidates and which delegates will probably have to defect to other groups once their candidate's "support" is revealed.

Due to the voting effects of these literal lateral social and networking pressures, as well as the immense importance attributed to the first and second place winners, two strategies will collide head to head that night, neither of which is mutually: the politics of charisma and the politics of mobilization. The politics of charisma shores up the enthusiasm of the delegates for a particular candidate and provides ample social capital to tip support toward a particular candidate. The politics of mobilization turns out a sympathetic demographic and prays that initial support is strong enough to prevent massive defection to another candidate.

On the Democratic side, Edwards and Obama have mastered charisma, and poured a lot of resources into mobilization. Clinton, while less charismatic, has designed a buddy-system turnout method, which should withstand early pressures for defection, and enlisted several popular locals: Magic Johnson, Bill Clinton, and former Governor Tom Vilsack.

On the Republic side, former Governor Huckabee has a lock on the politics of charisma--though monetary constraints have prevented him from investing into organized mobilization strategies--and former Governor Mitt Romney, through investment, has created a mobilization effect. Rudy Giuliani has only half-committed to the state. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has focused mostly on New Hampshire, but has received crucial endorsement nods as well as a lot of press from the surge.

As such, I predict (in this order) for Democrats: Edwards, Clinton, Obama, and for Republicans, Huckabee, Romney, and McCain.

I think that caucus trading between the enthusiasm of Edwards supporters and Obama supporters will weaken them both, and that, more importantly, Clinton, through the buddy system has inoculated many of her supporters from defection through the buddy-system (a source of mobilization as well as monitoring). Moreover, Edwards supporters are pissed that their candidate has been ignored in the press and will be prepared to court and collect any soft support. The nod from the Des Moines Register will improve Clinton's image for long enough after Christmas to have her fold in at least Gov. Bill Richardson's support and potentially Sen. Joe Biden's as well. (Generally, people support those candidates for experience and wonkishness rather than charisma.) I think that Dodd's and Kuchinich's appeal is more left-leaning and will disperse, roughly evenly, to Obama and Edwards.

As for the Republicans, I think that Romney machine has created a floor beyond which he cannot fall, and that enthusiasm for Huckabee is at an all-time high. Moreover, Huckabee can count on religious networks to mobilize communities for him, and to prevent defection by having them pre-organized along social ties of monitoring and enforcement. Giuliani's lackluster campaigning will force his supporters into the arms of a candidate is tough on security, John McCain, who also recently received the nod of the Des Moines Register as well. McCain will probably absorb a lot of other support, particularly from Thompson, as a candidate who can stop both Huckabee and Romney from becoming the nominee of the Republican party.

New Hampshire

In New Hampshire, the battle is for independents. However, without Iowa sending them a strong signal about which race is more dynamic, the Independents will probably divide their support among Republican and Democratic candidates, hurting those candidates who have most courted the Independent vote, Senators Obama and McCain, to overcome any weakness they have within their own parties. Moreover, the Clinton machine is furiously organizing the people of the New Hampshire, even the Obama's performance has his numerical support rising.

Without the independents voting mostly for Obama, or seeing a renewed interest in McCain in the wake of a good Iowa finish, I predict the following results for New Hampshire. For the Democrats, Clinton (narrow), Obama, and Edwards. (This is really going to put South Carolina in play.) For the Republicans, John McCain, Ron Paul, and a Mitt Romney/Huckabee tie.

McCain is very popular among New Hampshire Republicans now, a good showing in Iowa, as well as the recent endorsements of the New Hampshire papers and his team's focus on New Hampshire will probably swing the state for him. (Moreover, a resurgent McCain will reabsorb the Thompson off-shoot that emerged when the McCain team ran out of money and the Giuliani security hawks.) Ron Paul's money and the libertarian diaspora within New Hampshire's Republicans will create a solid finish for Ron Paul, giving him some much needed media space. Ron Paul's grassroots campaign is the most sophisticated of all the Republicans, and will greatly appeal to the small-government types who live in New Hampshire. Mitt Romney, again, due to money and time, will probably have a floor that will not evaporate, but Huckabee is going to have a run of the press for at least seven days after his Iowa victory, and growing numbers in South Carolina that will improve his image of electability.

Clinton will scoop out a narrow turn-out victory and descend on South Carolina as the friend of blacks and a the Democratic-comeback kid. (She will emphasize that she was the front-runner, whether the attacks, and campaign equally hard to win the affects of South Carolina. Most of her generals, however, will go to the Southwest and California as she wins the non-primary primaries in Florida.) Obama-mania will not have subsided in the wake of a non-Iowa victory, and, more importantly, Edwards will have to step up attacks on him, giving him more press time. Edwards, unfortunately, will not be able out maneuver either the Obama or Clinton grassroots campaigns, and, sadly, is not the fascination of the press (who like the idea of a Clinton-Obama fight). Edwards, too, will have to run to South Carolina and effectively cede the Southwest to Clinton.

The following people will have to leave after New Hampshire and Iowa: Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Fred Thompson, and Rudy Giuliani. Fred will probably endorse McCain as will Rudy to stop Romney and Hucakbee. Bill Richardson won't leave until Clinton has dusted off his campaign in the Southwest. I'm not sure when Dennis Kucinich will drop out.

The Israel Lobby

2007-10-30T04:53:00.001-07:00

The Israel Lobby

I rarely venture into books on contemporary politics, but I enjoyed Mearsheimer's Tragedy of Great Power Politics (even if I disagreed with a lot of it) , had some time on my hands, and decided that the furore surrounding the original article and book was too great to ignore.

Well, I have just finished the book, and am pleased to report that I learned much from it, including the extent of America's economic and military support for Israel, stuff about Israel's founding and wars against its neighbours that I didn't know about (but which historians like Benny Morris have re-examined), and the peculiar phenomenon that is Christian Zionism (whose origins I had begun to read about in Michael Oren's Power, Faith, and Fantasy -- alas, I've never gotten around to completing it). The core of the book, of course, is that the eponymous lobby's influence on US attitudes towards Israel is 1) bad for America, 2) bad for Israel, and 3) bad for the Palestinians. The authors are clear, concise, and thoroughly reasonable: they anticipate and tackle objections (including accusations of anti-Semitism), clarify important points, and avoid ideological and rhetorical extremes without compromising the overall force of their argument. I especially like how they implicate the lobby by using its own words against it (cue accusations of Dowdifying the evidence or relying excessively on secondary sources, which, given the nature of the topic, are pretty much all that's available). Attempts to silence the authors' arguments about the lobby and free speech ought simply to strengthen these arguments.

The one criticism I have is obviously from the perspective of a non-specialist: I'd like a longer and more prescriptive conclusion. Historians aren't supposed to be prescriptive, but political scientists can and should be. Unfortunately, Mearsheimer and Walt, while agreeing that the lobby's influence needs to be mitigated, are rather vague on how this might come about. For instance, they write that:

To foster a more open discussion, Americans of all backgrounds must reject the silencing tactics that some groups and individuals in the lobby continue to employ. Stifling debate and smearing opponents is [sic] inconsistent with the principles of vigorous and open dialogue on which democracy depends, and continued reliance on this undemocratic tactic runs the risk of generating a hostile backlash at some point in the future.

America needs a more open debate on its support for Israel, and a more even-handed relationship with the country, but given the strength of the lobby, what concrete steps are needed to make this happen? The authors urge the government to use its "considerable leverage" to sway Israeli policy-makers, apparently forgetting the lobby has its own "considerable leverage."

Legitimate criticisms of their book, like this one by Martin Kramer (whom the authors identify as part of the lobby but not a neoconservative) should focus on the extent to which Israel is a strategic asset or liability and offer more than the usual talking points on Israel's moral and democratic credentials. Bad criticism leans towards accusing the authors of anti-Semitism, which the right uses to bash the left in pretty much the same way that the left uses "racism" to bash the right. Consider this laughably simplistic piece by George Shultz. It's not quite as vicious as something by Alan Dershowitz or Marty Peretz, but it's still utterly unencumbered by knowledge of the book. It's always a good idea to read a book before "reviewing" it; every single accusation or veiled accusation the former Secretary of State makes is demolished in the book. Let me cite just a few examples:

"Jewish groups are influential. They also largely agree that the United States should support Israel. But the notion that they have anything like a uniform agenda and that U.S. policy in Israel and the Middle East is the result of this influence is simply wrong."Quite so, and this is in fact exactly what the authors write: the Israel lobby is not exclusively a Jewish lobby.

"Anyone who thinks that Jewish groups constitute a homogeneous "lobby" ought to spend some time dealing with them." Again, the authors make this point very clear in their book: left-leaning Jewish groups critical of Israel's policies and the extent of US support for Israel exist, but their influence isn't quite as great as the more right-wing groups.

"The United States supports Israel not because of favoritism based on political pressure or influence but because the American people, and their leaders, say that supporting Israel is politically sound and morally just." For goodness sake George, have you even read the book that you're criticising? And I really don't see how someone who supported the Nicaraguan contras can talk about morality as a justification for foreign policy. It is "morally just" to support Israel's right to exist, but this isn't what the authors are interested in.

Thank you, that's all for now.

Selling (Out) The Revolution: Re-thinking Social Movement Theory

2007-09-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

Selling (Out) The Revolution: Re-thinking Social Movement Theory

I've always been a little bothered by the distinctions between "real social struggles", struggles that in theory many people can get behind, and particular struggles, or struggles that only appeal to a certain people. This conundrum is a particular problem that liberals face when trying to build their leftist coalition and have to choose between the politics of reform and the politics of 'difference.'

A lot of people are surpised that the Democrats haven't tried harder to end the war in Congress and sooner. The netroots are a little peeved that the moderate Democrats, until now, have focused more on wooing the moderate Republicans, who still toe the party line, than ending the war in a showdown of government. Some pundits worry that the failure of the Democratic Congress will demoralize voters in 2008.

In a way, people should not be suprised. Without 58+ votes in the Senate, it's hard to get anything done (as cloture requires 60). More importantly, however, in absense of wide-spread devastation, the true change will always be thwarted at the elite level by the grab for political power.

Craig Calhoun, a theorists of social movements, writes: “’Identity politics’ and similar concerns were never quite so much absent from the field of social movement activity--even in the heydays of liberal party politics or organized trade union struggle--as they were obscured from conventional academic observation.” Moreover, these labor and social democratic struggles not only dominate the field of social movements, but force all other organizing “aimed at economic or institutionally political goals” into the residual alter-concept of “new social movements.” For scholars of social movements, labor and social democratic struggles are thereby differentiated from the new social movements both economically and politically. Economically, the analytic of social-labor movements dramatize and illustrate the singular set of social questions of industrial and post-industrial capitalism: the amount of redistribution and the character of national political economy. (Gilpin 2001) Politically, these labor and social democratic movements sponsored new political constellations of governance, making possible public policies avoided by the non-labor elites and creating the foundations for a general, “utopian” transformation of the society by the state. In contrast, new social movements are particular in their constitution, parochial in the worldviews, and without a broad coalition with which to capture to political power: characterized derisively by the moniker “identity politics.” Why did scholars lionize the labor movement, and, in the process, downplay the preceding and succeeding “new” social movements? What makes some movements real and others ephemeral, merely cultural, or just plain ignored?

Scholars celebrated the labor struggles for two reasons. First, the politics of labor and the public policies social democratic movements stood for and enabled seemed more normatively universalizable and politically feasible than their identity politics counterparts. For Marx and many theorists who followed him, the lived experiences of workers and class structures exhausted all of the politically relevant subaltern identities. After realizing their oppression, the laboring classes could capture political power and transform the social bases of their oppression into an emancipatory dictatorship of the proletariat. Post-Marxian theorizing appropriated this Marxist logic of representative social classes without buying the orthodox eschatological yearnings for the Revolution. Habermas, as one example, argues that the bourgeois class can constitute a democratic public comprised of political individuals. What is important in history is that bourgeois as a social class can found a publicly rational, inclusive, and democratic political space

Second, identity politics seemed parochial, less inclusive, and less ‘traditionally’ political. Identity politics, in that it does not necessarily lead to distributive struggles, is based on ascriptive and expressive identities. As such, according to Calhoun, new social movements seek to “politicize the personal.”

Why does this debate over the history of social movements matter for the study of revolutions? The debate is important because it illuminates how revolutionary social movements transform into political movements by abandoning any real struggle for social change and accommodating themselves to the powers that are. Social movements lose hold of the revolution by grasping for political power. In this debate, revisionist theories of new social movements do not simply complicate the happy history of social movements, or even merely de-center white laborers as the source of social change. They demonstrate the trade-off between revolution and politics within social movements, which emerges from the fact that all polities are founded upon hierarchies of difference.

After E. P. Thompson’s magisterial work, no one can seriously doubt that a social movement’s political power, in this case the English working class, is tied to its active participation in and support for hierarchical orders within society. (See also Calhoun, 183-184) These hierarchical orders are the social power relations—of race, gender, sexuality, and indigeneity—which constitutes difference and enables denigration. At the top of these social hierarchies are the masters and the elites; at bottom, the subalterns. Social movements are revolutionary to the extent that they seek to challenge and contest these hierarchies; as Calhoun notes, “Roots [make] many movements radical, even when they did not offer comprehensive plans for societal restructuring.” These roots necessitate a focus of the movement on the power relations of society since social movements in general, for Calhoun at least, are premised on a defense of a ‘lifeworld’ from colonizing structures.

The paradox of these social movements, and the key problem for theorists of revolution, is the trade-off between social transformation of hierarchal orders and aspirations to political hegemony. The aim of political change is to capture, or through coalitions govern, state institutions and the levers of power. As Ernest Laclau theorizes, “a certain particular, by making its own particularity the signifying body of a universal representation, comes to occupy—within the system of differences as a whole—a hegemonic role.” All social movements emerge from particular identities, whether that identity is that of the worker or of the woman. Some social movements and the social democratic movement in particular, attempted to, on the basis of its particularity, found a system of political economy and representation for the state as a whole. Whether Marx’s proletarians or Habermas’ bourgeois, to attain political power, social movements claim to represent the set of universal questions and identities posed by sulaterity’s existence.

For Laclau, this move toward political representation “is exactly what we call a hegemonic relationship… A class or group is considered to be hegemonic when it… presents itself as realizing the broader aims… of the population.” To cater to the kind of coalition necessary to govern, social revolutionaries must abandon their social goals. Therefore, for the political movements, the defense of the ‘lifeworld’ from colonization is premised upon a quiet, but expeditious, assimilation into the colonizing structures themselves. Consider the case of the Enlightenment. “It is more accurate to the call the ‘enlightenment’”, Eric Hobsbawm notes, “a revolutionary ideology, [whose object] in spite of the political caution and moderation of many of its continent champions... [was] to set all human beings free.” In practice, however, Hobsbawm wryly noted, “the social order which [emerged]...would be a 'bourgeois' and a capitalist one,” a far cry from what we could imagine emancipation to be. Hegemony, a political goal, only comes at the expense of revolution, a social goal.

Revolutionary social movements, in contrast, seek to recast the social hierarchies which enable some horizons and life choices while foreclosing others. These hierarchies possess political and economic dimension because the social orders that emerge from the hierarchal relations deny equal political subjectivity and constitute a socioeconomic division of labor to the subaltern elements. The hierarchies have largely been about moving the natives off the land, the women into the kitchen, the blacks back into the fields, and, in late modernity, the gays back into the closet. Many political movements acknowledge these social orders by playing up the political and economic consequences of the social order in an attempt to sell their platforms to constituencies, but in the process sell out the prospects of meaningful social change for political allies.

This is not to push the distinctions between the political and social too heavily. In fact, most social questions surely have a political and economic dimension. The Negro question, for example, was about both citizenship and labor for most of American history. However, the essence of the social question and its revolutionary potential, lies in the challenge to the very relations of power and subjectivity making those questions possible. Therefore, the Negro question in American history can be expressed, in part, in terms of suffrage and redistribution, but only in part. The revolutionary aspect of the Negro question acknowledges that the question was not and never will be really about the Negro, but rather always about the racists trying to maintain a racial hierarchy while keeping blacks in their places. (Satre) The challenges to the racial order have nonetheless sold out as well. To attain a place in society, movements for black liberation have embraced anti-feminist and heterosexist politics.

Loosing sight of this revolutionary core of social movements is what mainstream analysts did when they erased the old “new” social movements to perpetuate the mythopoetic narrative of the golden age of social democratic labor movements. This is unfortunate because the social revolutionary prospect is the only moral justification that participants in social movements have for engaging in acts of violence and disobedience to law. Therefore, it is disgustingly criminal and grossly immoral for elites to murder, rape, and pillage for political power; but justified—and some would even say welcome—for a slave to rise up against the masters who have raped for generations, to slit the master’s throat, and to burn his house down with the master’s corpse, his wives, sisters, and children still alive inside.

Only black feminists have grasped this paradox.

Five Rupees

2007-09-20T23:59:00.000-07:00

I'd like to mention the blog of a friend, to which we will now link on this site: http://fiverupees.blogspot.com/

And he'd thought that we would never link to him.

A Little on Why I am Supporting Hillary Clinton

2007-09-20T23:49:00.000-07:00

A Little on Why I am Supporting Hillary Clinton

Since the Democrats won Congress, I've been making three predictions: (1) That Clinton would capture the Democratic nomination (due to superior organization), (2) that the most organized campaign on the Republican side (McCain) would flounder until Thompson joined the race (and become a two way race between those two candidates), and (3) that the presidential election would come down to whether Clinton could take the Southwest and a few Southern states. (Note a Clinton-Obama ticket would make the South very competitive due the black and Latino votes). In a few weeks I'll post my projections for Congressional Elections. It's going to be a Democratic House, but the real action is in the Senate.

So far it seems that I am right. A lot of people have asked me: why I am supporting Clinton? Quite simply, she is a pragmatic candidate with foreign policy experience who is a policy wonk, who will also be able to get Congress to pass her legislation. I can count on her to get the right policies passed. (Which is more than I can say about any other candidate in the field.)

I was just thinking a super-shrewd strategy is for Clinton to appoint Lieberman to be SecDef, getting him out of the Senate. Lieberman is a part of her DLC-wing of the Democrat party, he's tough on defense (like her), and she'll get a more reliable Connecticut Democrat (rather than a Democrat-leaning Independent) in the Senate to be appointed by the governor of Connecticut. Lieberman would have no trouble getting confirmed either.

So I'm thinking a good cabinet for her would be:
Lieberman- SecDef
Obama- Vice President
Edwards- Labor or HUD
EPA- Al Gore
Bill Clinton- unofficial ambassador to the World, deputy chief of policy planning

This would be a strong signal to her base that she was committed to having the best possible Cabinet, and, all of those people would be easily confirmable by the Senate.

Why Obama Must Navigate Racial Politics Carefully

2007-02-05T21:22:00.000-08:00

Why Obama Must Navigate Racial Politics Carefully

This post is inspired by reactions to a piece in the New York Times on why Obama "can't take the black vote for granted" in the primary Democratic elections.

In response to this quote:

"Obama isn't black" [...] "I've got nothing but love for the brother, but we don't have anything in common," said Ms. Dickerson, who wrote recently about Mr. Obama in Salon, the online magazine. "His father was African. His mother was a white woman. He grew up with white grandparents.

many of the reactions have been more or less "I have no particular feelings either for or against Obama, but I have nothing but disgust for the modern conceits of identity politics."

This post will takle the conviction that discussions of Obama's racial identity (by anyone, but especially black citizens) is a disgusting perversion of (an already problematic) identity politics.

I strongly disagree that this particular form of identity politics is a problem, even though I vehemently disagree with the content and nature of the discussions about Obama's racial identity within some quarters of the black community.

It is important for black voters to decide in which ways they will choose to support aspects of Obama's political message, because, whether anyone wishes it or not, an Obama administration would define discussions about race in America more hegemonically than other administration before. It is precisely because of the acute differences in the lived experiences of those persons who come to be portrayed as and identify with "black" American citizens that the Obama campaign will generate a lot of discussions within black communities about the nature of black political identity itself and what the tensions in that identity will mean for future discussions.

These differences in lived experiences largely track along socioeconomic lines. It is an empirical fact that the kinds of people who end up being categorized as black who also attend elite institutions are (more often than not) of Caribbean or African immigrant ancestry and a middle-class background. The composition of those who end up being seen as black but who also "under-perform" usually lack (non-slave) immigrant ancestry and come from working and lower class backgrounds. (It is roughly the difference between the identity politics of Dartmouth's African-American Society, and those of the black student union at City College in New York.) Because the larger racial order lumps them together, there is an uneasy alliance between two classes who, other than the social meanings invested into their variegated skin pigmentations, have little in common socially, politically, and economically.

Whereas immigrants and middle class black still largely support affirmative action--because its a useful tie-breaker for them-- working class black would prefer to live without the stigma and the misplacement that AA engenders. Working class blacks generally prefer a re-targeting of the American welfare state to provide less benefits to the propertied middle and upper-middle classes, and more to those persons who, for many reasons, historical and legal, do not live in suburban affluence. Failing a re-targerting, working class blacks support European-style universal welfare programs over the targeted ones of the current system. The black working class provides those members of society whose "averaged" African American LSAT scores at elite school is less than the "averaged" white LSAT scores.

What *is not* important in these averaged scores, as opponents of race-based affirmative action would have you believe, is the discrepancy between the scores of blacks and non-black others. By definition, averages compress the extremes into a simplified statistic. That means that even in elite law schools there are blacks whose LSAT scores were significantly better than that of some of their admitted white classmates, even though through the language of (a rather convenient) appeal to "race blind" "justice" every white can claim to have been admitted on "merit" whereas blacks have to live with the stigma of preference.

What *is* important is the spread/ distribution of scores. Black (and Hispanic) scores probably have larger variance than those of other groups. The qualified are pretty much guaranteed admission--in equal contests that candidate supported by affirmative action always wins--and admissions officers have to reach down to bring the target numbers up to a percentage range determined by them. Recruiting these lower scores to create a target population is what Justice Thomas lampoons as ethnic window-dressing. This variance is a reflection of the very different lived experiences of those Americans who come to be known as "black" and matters greatly for their respective worldviews, and, more importantly, for their social and political options within the hierarchies of capitalist society.

That suppressed and rather testy discussion about black political identity, then, bubbles to the surface as many of the poorer and working class blacks, and their (largely self-appointed) ideological re-presentatives question loudly in whose interests Obama's racial constructions are forged. And they have good reason to believe it's not going to be in their interest.

Lastly, many blacks fear that the election of Obama, or even his successful nomination. will be used as an excuse to close the chapter on an increasingly bitter celebration of the post-King civil rights era. (I say post-King because with King's mythologization as a democratic saint, popular histories about the period erase the tensions that were present even then, and project them into an equally mythological "betrayal" of King's "legacy.")

Clinton for President

2007-01-28T21:58:00.000-08:00

Hilary Clinton for President

I'm temporarily emerging out from under the master's thesis rock.

Let my support for her be known. This blog encourages you to donate to her campaign as early and as often as your budget will allow. If you exceed your limits, donate to the political action committees which comprise her network. More on Hilary as I am moved to do so.

Bauerlein on Sullivan, Berube, and D'Souza

2006-12-13T06:14:00.000-08:00

Bauerlein on Sullivan, Berube, and D'Souza

Mark Bauerlein has an excellent essay in the Chronicle Review on the need for academia to engage with conservative thought. Money quote:

More important, however, the conservative tradition remains a vital resource of ideas and theories, a heritage that claims world triumphs. To gain it the full measure it warrants — and to bring it to bear wisely on the issues we confront — we need more than conservative pundits on television or in the blogosphere, more than conservative publishers or think tanks. We need to subject it to the full analysis — critical and appreciative — of the academy, to bring conservative works into the classroom and onto the syllabus. It would be healthy for everyone if the academic curriculum broadened its scope, if the lineage of conservatism were consolidated into a respectable course of study — that is, if Hayek won one-tenth the attention that Foucault receives.

Atheism, religion, and mass murder

2006-11-24T02:30:00.000-08:00

Atheism, religion, and mass murder

Dinesh D'Souza, who hasn't been mentioned in the pages of this blog for a loooong time, makes a reappearance in the public scene with this article on how atheism, as opposed to religion, is "the real force behind the mass murders of history." Citing Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, he writes that "Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades."

I'm a little confused by the article. On the one hand, D'Souza rightly points out that violence on a large scale takes place for all sorts of reasons that do not have to do with religion -- ethnicity, territory, etc. On the other hand, he states that atheism is responsible for all the killings under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Well sure, the three of them were almost certainly nonbelievers. But of what sort: atheists, agnostics, or something else? More importantly, why boil phenomena as complex as Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism to one causal factor? D'Souza seems to be guilty of precisely what he accuses Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris of -- oversimplifying historical reality.

The Silliness of the War on Terror

2006-11-21T09:50:00.000-08:00

The Silliness of the War on Terror

I was reading a forwarded email from my sister (who, in the interest of full disclosure is in the air force), the text of which can be found here: http://www.snopes.com/rumors/soapbox/chong.asp. (There is value in reading it, so I suggest that you do so.)

It was the usual clap-trap suggesting that the current war on terror is the most dangerous and important war that America has ever waged. Since so few people these days actually believe that "terrorism" is a real threat, or that fighting the war on terror in any sense 'matters' for American security, I do not feel a need to emphasize that part of my argument. (Though if anyone wanted to make a serious case that terrorism 'matters' for American security, feel free. I'll be happy to take up that argument if necessary.)

My real beef (or tofu since I'm a vegetarian) with the "Omg, the terrorists are going to kill us all" line of argument is its emphasis on the unique threat posed by Islamic radicalism (or whatever term of endearment once prefers. The term "Islamofascism," I believe, is en vogue these days). That hypothesis/claim-- that radical, politicized, violent Islam is a threat to American security--is false and wrong. Critics of that belief usually respond with along two lines, both of which are valid, but neither of which eviscerate the heart of the argument.

The first response is that Islam is an inherently peaceful religion and therefore it is racist/imperialist/orientalist/close-minded to impute to Islam fanatical and violent tendencies. This response is inadequate because no religion, from a secular point of view, is inherently anything; the religion is what its practitioners make it. The form of that religion could be violent, liberal, dovish, or anti-statist; whatever interpretation or form a religion takes, however, is a result of the particular context and process of (discursive) reasoning ensconced within unique historical trajectories.

The second argument against the Islamic radicalism hypothesis is the power politics critique. This response basically says that even if Muslims are a threat, they can't do anything to the United States. Poor nations simply lack the resources and material capabilities to threaten the biggest state in the world. If the poor nations get uppity and ever truly threaten the United States, then that state will be invaded or remade by the United States, absent said state possessing a small nuclear deterrent. In short, resistance to the United States which threatens its existence is suicide and is therefore futile. Needless to say that this argument does not really address the claim, but says that the claim doesn't matter.

My argument against the "Radical Muslims are dangerous" hypothesis attacks the central logic that Islam provides an ideological recruiting ground for an endless and deadly struggle of attrition. This logic correctly assumes that radical leaders are only dangerous when they can convinced the moderates to acquiesce or join them in the struggle. (We have evidence from other violent revolutionary movements that this is the case.) We have more evidence that the radical Islamists are having a hard time recruiting 'martyrs' and willing recruits for missions. Proponents of the radical Muslims thesis usually point out the rabid anti-Americanism around the globe where, in some countries, figures are as high as 80% of people who think that what America is doing is bad. The proponents have overstated their case. If so many people are anti-American and if Islam creates a fertile recruiting ground, why are there so few martyrs in struggle? The case of the missing martyrs is a bit damning and requires further elaboration.

Anti-American is chic these days. How many chat rooms regularly produce what could be considered anti-American speech? Many do. But when it comes to supporting violent Islamist parties in their countries, or even non-violent parties who wish to implement sharia, the voters consistently give them less than 5% of the vote. (Islamist parties who are running in elections against a ruling party/ family tend to do well, but, given that they are only opposition, that is not surprising.) Rather than see a threat everywhere, we should be struck by the infrequency of terrorist attacks, random shootings, arson by Muslims in particular and by potential sympathizers in general.

In summary, terrorism is not a threat that we should worry about. Moreover, the terrorism that has occurred can't be explained by links between the acts of violence and Muslims.

A potential counter to my claim is that while terrorism is not an existential threat for the United States, what's happening in southern Thailand, not to mention the Philippines, Indonesia, Sudan, Somalia, Chechnya, and Pakistan, suggests that terrorism in the name of Islam is indeed a threat worth taking seriously, even if these terrorists are not primarily motivated by Islam. I agree that these countries face serious threats by militants invoking Islam, but what do we gain, either descriptively or analytically, by considering them terrorists and not simply insurgents?

For instance, consider the war in Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers. Suicide bombing occurs against the population almost everyday. There is a way in which terrorism adequately describes what is going on: each armed gang, loosely connected to one of the 'sides', is attempting to reduce the other side's popular support from fence-sittiers and for the committed, to make supporting the side very costly. However, focusing simply on the suicide terrorism obscures the master political cleavage which is driving the acts of violence: that there exists an organized group of people who do not wish to live in a unified Sri Lankan state. Many of the Islamic wars in central Asia, or the insurgencies in Pakistan and Yemen, do employ Islamic rhetoric and deploy Islamic symbols. The focus of their violence and symbolism, however, targets those regimes suppression of internal ethnic and political minorities, and/or those regimes' cooperation with the United States. We must not lose sight of the fact that these are radical revolutionary movements aiming toward civil war, and not simply 'terrorism.'

The move toward classifying as terrorist those armed gangs who, through invocations of Islam, perpetrate violence against states and citizens, cloaks the fact that they are simply revolutionary movements in states who want them to just go away. The 'terrorist' framework, instead of focusing on the goals and incentives of the organizations, categorizes them according to their tactics. In this way, the images of barbarians who behead reporters, stone women, kill civilians, sabotage commercial airlines, and recruit children for suicide missions comes to predominate over the reasons the people are in that situation in the first place. Violence in the 'terrorist' framework becomes its own explanation and source of condemnation: an exquisite, if crude, way of chronicling violence to distinguish between the civilized 'us' and the barbarian 'them.'

The reasons I argue against the terrorist framing is that violence should never be considered as an end to itself, but only as a means. The study of acts of violence must primarily be historical and then political. By historical study, I mean inquiry that situates the actors within their context in a complex chain of contingent human events. Without this context, acts of violence lose their meaning and the reasons that those acts became thinkable and doable in the first place. By political study, I mean sustained and comparative focus on who the targets are and why they were selected, and who the perpetrators are. Historical study describes the process by which a certain menu of options became available, and political study details how and why the options that were chosen got chosen.

Therefore the question for Thailand becomes not "how many Muslims are resisting the state and prepared to do violence against civilians" but rather "Why do the Muslims feel it necessary to turn to violence against this regime?"

If not Rummy, then who?

2006-11-13T07:54:00.000-08:00

If not Rummy, then who?

Oh look, Doug Feith is trying to rehabilitate Rummy in this Washington Post article. Read it and be amazed: almost everything that you think you know about the former SecDef is wrong, Feith claims. He's a "bundle of paradoxes, like a fascinating character in a work of epic literature." He's not an ideologue, but an empiricist who "does not suppress bad news; he acts on it." And then there's this passage, in which Feith tries to shift blame for the inadequate troop levels from his man to Generals Abizaid and Franks:

But Rumsfeld never told Gen. John Abizaid or Gen. Tommy Franks that U.S. Central Command could not have the number of troops that the commanders deemed necessary. Rumsfeld is more politically sensitive than that -- he would never expose himself to the risk of a commander later saying that he had denied him the forces needed. If other generals are unhappy with the troop levels in Iraq, the problem is not that they failed to persuade Rumsfeld, but that they failed to persuade Abizaid or Franks.

Ok, so let's assume Feith is being honest here: maybe Rummy wasn't that bad, and perhaps history will exonerate him. But it's still a maddeningly inadequate op-ed, because it begs the question: if Donald Rumsfeld, as Feith suggests, isn't responsible for the mess in Iraq (which Feith doesn't refer to at all), then who is? Name names Doug.

Gregory Rabassa '44 wins National Arts Medal

2006-11-10T02:13:00.000-08:00

Gregory Rabassa

I'm surprised that neither The D nor the Dartmouth website hasn't mentioned this: Gregory Rabassa '44, distinguished translator of Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, and Vargas Llosa, has been awarded the National Arts Medal. I've read his translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it was pretty brilliant.

Fresh blood!

2006-11-03T21:38:00.000-08:00

Fresh blood!

In an effort to get this blog going again, I have invited a very good friend of mine (not a Dartmouth graduate) to post here. He's widely read in history, philosophy, theology, literature, and pop culture, and we are very much looking forward to his inaugural contribution.

2006-09-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

"Islamic Fascism"

It isn't a term that I would use, but it isn't as useless as one would think. As Martin Kramer points out in his latest Sandstorm piece, scholars of the Middle East, including the Marxist Maxine Rodinson, have drawn links between Islamism and Fascism in the past.

2006-09-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

The internet connection countines to be spotty. However, I am commuting to work and school regularly now so we can begin our walk through the Bible this week.

Conservatives in revolt, part 514

2006-09-15T22:07:00.001-07:00

Conservatives in revolt, part 514

In case you've missed it, The Washington Monthly features articles by seven prominent conservatives, including Dartmouth's Jeffrey Hart, on just how un-conservative the Bush administration has become.

2006-09-07T07:44:00.000-07:00

Expect more updates next week. Though I doubt any of you wish to know the everyday details of living, I want to share the reasons why I have not posted this week despite prior promises to the contrary.

One, my personal Internet connection disappeared for one week. Two, I moved further away from campus during that time. Three, I moved into a new apartment. Four, I'm trying to write an NSF grant proposal.

Next week things look good because all four should have ceased by then.

Dear Old Dartmouth

2006-08-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Old Dartmouth

In an attempt to arrest the progress of the College, the forces for and against the Constitution are planning to do battle in Hanover come fall.

Recent alumni and rising seniors at Voxclamantisindeserto.org and The Little Green Blog (to say nothing of Malchow) pit the insurgents who have recently won trustee elections against the institutionalists-- those whose political and social views largely lean left with the rest of the Dartmouth's administration.

Vox's views, and its opposition to the constitution, are generally unsurprising. It announces its purpose as "website [serving as] a means of communication and information for those alumni of Dartmouth College unwilling to accept the often misleading public relations material issued by the College. This site contains articles by, and authentic accounts of, students currently enrolled in the College." As a part of its "authentic accounts" it contains a weepy missive from Nick Stork '06 claiming that David Spaulding, the Vice President of Alumni Affairs, attempted to intimidate him after Stork mass blitzed a group of his fraternity brothers and associates to vote against the upcoming alumni constitution. Moreover, the group therapy offered by the website and its cantankerous, reactionary readership have transformed an embellished account of Stork's meeting with Spaulding into a claim that this is more proof that Dartmouth's administration is against freedom of speech, conscience, and hates non-leftists.

The Vox are not without their collaborators.

Andrew Seal '07, who alternates between claiming ideological independence and sheer lunacy as often as twice a sentence, atypically offers a shrewd analysis of the situation.

I think both sides come at the constitution from the same assumption: that they are fighting to give alumni what they really want, which is, of course, coterminous with what their “side” wants. The pro-constitution side, I think, really believes that the past two trustee elections have not been reflective of genuine alumni will, but have been the result of problems in the system that allowed Rogers, Zywicki, and Robinson to ride in on a small wave of discontent and confusion. I think they sincerely believe that the majority of alumni do not prefer candidates who bank on being “outsiders” for their electability. The anti-constitution side seriously believes that they are at the head of a growing movement deeply dissatisfied with the current trajectory of the College.

The debate is about controlling the future of the college, with both sides entrenched and yelling.

Joe Malchow, never more than a moment's notice from right-wing rectitude (or hysteria), fired off this response:

Forget the constitution. Forget it. By lengths, the graver news is that this incident, coupled with that of the other student who has come forward, Andrew Eastman ‘07, constitutes a crackdown on freedom of political expression at my school. On principle, and as the author of a blog, I cannot stay quiet about grounded allegations of censorship and intimidation. And not just allegations—these things have occured. How do we know? The chilling effect.

Slowy shifting the debate about the constitution to innuendos about rights violations helps capture the disaffected alumni and galvanize them into a movement. It is one of the best parlor tricks I've seen in a while. Eugene Volokh explodes the hysteria with this analysis (with my emphasis added):

I take it that the student might have been somewhat worried that the administrator would somehow affect the closing days of his school career (the student was about to graduate), but it would take someone with a pretty poor view of Dartmouth to think that there's that much of a chance that the administrator would, say, urge professors to unfairly lower the student's grades or some such. (Top universities, to my knowledge, are known for leaving the individual grading decisions to the professors, except to the extent that they leave them to TAs.) And if this was the student's view of Dartmouth, then I'm surprised he had spoken out in the first instance, since the administration could (if it's willing to break all the rules) retaliate against a student whether or not an administrator decides to personally argue with the student. All the evidence suggests is that the administration is willing to talk back to students who they think express unsound views. Not a lot to build a case of intimidation and censorship (much less, as the blogger later says, "indecent tactics"), it seems to me.

The key move is that the constitution is not the true target, the administration is. Once you realize that many view the upcoming vote on the constitution as a referendum, this whole constitution hullaboo begins to make sense. The constitution is just a red herring meant to attract those who already have a poor opinion of the College.

Part of the problem with this whole episode and the ripple of events surrounding this infernal constitution is that the students involved don't really understand what free speech means. If a student forwards a proposition, particularly if it is publicly announced in a student group or as public statements, it may well be that the other members campus, students and administrators alike, will learn of the propositon and its contents. Public speakers and group leaders should be prepared for that. In fact if, as a result of the proposition going forward to the public, an administrator "criticizes [the speaker's] views" and says "your political views are wrong, here are the right ones," this is also free speech, an entitlement possessed by administrators as well.

Free speech isn't just that you get to criticize the administration and not be expelled; it also means that you agree to participate in a public discussion in which your ideas are criticized and defended. Any sophmore knows that criticizing and negative aspect of free speech. Moving beyond sophmorism, however, entails learning about reciprocity and dialouge.

These John-the-Baptist wannabe's (Malchow and that infernal racket in the wilderness) transform a healthy debate about the role of the alumni in the governance of Dartmouth into a mudslinging contest comprising of innuendo about and a referendum on the Wright administration. Many of this ilk "suffered" the implementation of the SLI, the near dissolution of the swimming team, the further regulation of single-sex Greek life, the ousting of Gazzaniga, and the closure of the speech department. Bitter that the administration ignored them, and that Review's sophomoric opinions about Dartmouth life remained on the margins, they view the struggle over the constitution and the future trustees of the college as payback and necessary against the perceived maleovent tyranny of the College's administration.

Seal's problem with it is that it shows that Dartmouth doesn't trust alums.

What the constitution gives is a static, idle democracy that seems focused entirely on collecting inputs, without much thought given to how some outputs might be gotten out, or even what those outputs might be. Sure, the Constitution would likely introduce a broader level of participation in alumni governance, but I cannot help but think that breadth in this case precludes the addition of depth as well. I mean, I'd like to think that the new structure(s) introduced in the Constitution will allow a significantly larger number of people the chance to be creative agents in the process of alumni governance, but I'm not entirely convinced that will happen, and I'm not sure it's even intended to do so.

The presidential power arc (going from vice president to president-elect to president to past president) really bothers me because it is, quite simply, the most blatant sign that there is a massive distrust among the drafters of this constitution of the dynamics of personal choice. This complete lack of faith in the alumni body of Dartmouth College is what this structure, or any structure so ordered, reveals. The presidential power arc takes the elected candidate and just, well, sort of holds him/her for consideration for awhile, until s/he is either changed or at least influenced by those further up on the presidential ladder, or until his/her campaign platform has become less relevant or less important. It's a cooling method, and while insulation from the passions of an inflamed public can be a great thing in government, the iciness of this particular measure is, I think, a little out of proportion to the danger of the situation.... To put it bluntly, this is democracy with a fudge factor.

Andrew's main claim is that the democracy of the college will lessen with the adoption of the constitution. Seal assumes that a strong alumni voice will make for better goveranance and more democracy. But why should the College care what alumni have to say, especially when a significant subsection of the alumni are still fighting old battles? Our job as alumni is to donate early and often, not to ask questions. Does this seem callous or glib? Let me state is more formally: alumni governance is neither good governance nor very democratic. Mark Graber expertly summarizes my views on this issue:

Alumni democracy is highly likely to be bad democracy. Alumni have almost every characteristic that bodes ill for democratic governance. Most of us are poorly informed about the issues facing our alma mater, get what information we have from very biased sources, do not spend a much time becoming informed about the issues, and have little material incentive in the outcome of university controversies. In short, it is hard to think of an association more ripe for takeover by groups with unrepresentative agendas than an alumni democracy. Maybe I should form an association of Dartmouth alums in the teaching business that, in the guise of complaining about educational standards, would force Dartmouth professors to assign more of our writings. Would not be all that hard to do, which is one thing wrong with alumni democracy.

More significantly, alumni democracy is not democracy. A central feature of democracy is that the people whose lives are affected by the policy get to vote for the people who make the policy. Democracies are hardly perfect in this sense. Consider how many Iraqis got to vote in the 2004 election, even though the results may have been more important for their lives than most Americans. Still, the notion of alumni democracy seems akin to granting all Americans who served at least a year in Iraq a permanent vote in Iraqi elections. My life is insufficiently affected by what goes on at Dartmouth to justify my having an effective voice in college policy. As alumni, we ought to be more concerned about having an effective voice where we are, not where we were...

NONE OF OUR BUSINESS: LET STUDENTS, FACULTY, ADMINISTRATIVE, AND STAFF DECIDE WHAT DARTMOUTH WILL BE TODAY. The Dartmouth I went to had much good and some bad. Nothing I can do will change that past. But outside of giving advice, I think the present of Dartmouth and other universities should be decided by those who are there, not by those of us who want to impose unrepresentative agendas on young men and women.

And that's exactly right.

The Edge of Knife

2006-08-28T05:30:00.000-07:00

The Edge of Knife

The situation in Israel is still tenuous.

First, the good news. "Had Hezbollah known how Israel was going to respond, the group would not have captured two Israeli soldiers last month in northern Israel, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Sunday." That's right Hassan, southern Lebanon is not looking very nice right now is it? In fact, Iran is probably wondering how you managed to force it to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to your (now) emasculated terror organization, isn't it? Truth is: you can't fire rockets at Israel with the UN force there. If you do something stupid, someone is going to blow you up. Sure, you are still a functioning organization, but it's so much more risky now to terrorize Israelis, isn't it. Oh, and by the way, you have to shelter about a million displaced persons. Good luck with that.

Second, the not so good news. For once, Ha'aretz is not trying to bury yet another government. Let's look at this piece by piece and see what the problem is though.

The reserve soldiers who were sent deep into Hezbollah territory without being properly equipped have not concealed their anger. Protest movements have sprung up overnight demanding a national commission of inquiry and the dismissal of Ehud Olmert, Dan Halutz and Amir Peretz.

But the public outcry has done a certain injustice to the parties in question. Halutz is a great military brain and an exceptionally accomplished soldier. Peretz is not a military expert, but he has leadership skills and experience. Olmert is a savvy politician, smart, clever and cool as a cucumber, who did well in America.

What happened is that our best and brightest suddenly lost it. They had an attack of reckless, sloppy, half-baked thinking.

This is fine. This blog has criticized this Olmert government for not having a plan for victory. (It was too much like the Bush failure in Iraq, or, the impending war against Iran for me not to complain. I couldn't count myself a friend of Israel if I didn't complain when it was justified to do so.)

The author, however, goes a bit too far after that writing, "It would never have happened to some of the people who held their jobs before them." Alright, let's get ready for the bad history lesson.

Yitzhak Rabin, for example, was the anxious type. At the very suggestion of some military operation, his face would turn grim and you could guess right away what he was going through his head his breakdown on the eve of the Six Day War, his defeat at the polls in 1977, the experience of the first intifada. Yitzhak Shamir could not be dragged into any kind of military escapade. He would not let his defense minister, Moshe Arens, or his chief of staff, Ehud Barak, bomb Iraq when the Scuds were falling here during the Gulf War.

Ah, it's the old compare the average of today to the best of yesterday strategy. It always leads to disappointment. People criticized Shamir and Barak plenty enough when things were going on. (Rabin was lucky enough to die on the job (like Socrates) and leave it to Peres to screw things up.) Shamir, I think, got bullied into a regional summit, didn't he? Luckily the article ends on the right note:

On second thought, despite all the public fury and the clamor to kick out the "Big Three," ousting the government and appointing a commission of inquiry could turn out to be a serious mistake. We have no better players sitting on the bench today. We have no time for a commission that will start investigating everything that has happened since May 2000 and reach its conclusions in another year from now, when there are so many challenges staring us in the face.

Better to let the current administration, which is barely four months old, learn from its mistakes and make some quick all-around improvements. By chopping off heads, we will not rebuild ourselves.

Olmert deserves another chance. Labor may or may not need to be in the government, but this is no time to let Bibi and his minions back into power. There is a reason Sharon left that party.

Kadima must survive the present government or Israel is doomed. Building its wall of apartheid, Israel must a find a way forward from its current demographic mess a democratic country for Jews, or else it risks its own annihilation by provoking a mass uprising of the Palestinians whose political, economic, and cultural infrastructure the Israeli state has destroyed, leaving a vacuum filled with longing, nostalgia, rage, and a sense of injustice. Let us pray that is does not come to that. Kadima is our last hope.